The police should hack more

Original author: BBC
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The UK Ministry of Internal Affairs has signed up to the EU cybercrime strategy, which is pushing European police to remotely monitor personal data.

The plan raised a wave of concern that the government is increasing police powers to hack into citizens' computers without a court order.
United Kingdom police have already carried out a “small number” of such operations under this law.

However, the British Interior Ministry said that an agreement with the European Union will not affect the activities of the police.

A plan drawn up by the EU Council provides a broad description of how to improve the fight against cyber crime, including calling on countries to allow remote screening if it is already being carried out under national law.

In a report on this agreement, the Council stated that “the new strategy offers (the police and the private sector) to resort to remote screening.”

British law already allows police to remotely access computers in accordance with the Investigation Authority Act 2000, which allows surveillance to "prevent or detect" serious crimes. "

The Speaker of the Association of Police Chief Executives (Acpo) told The Times that the police have already carried out a small number of such operations on 194 hidden searches of homes, offices and hotel rooms last year.
“The United Kingdom agreed with the strategic approaches to tracking cyber crimes with other EU member states, but this has nothing to do with the current laws of the United Kingdom,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs said, adding that the plan is not binding and is not limited in time for the implementation of the strategy.

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Jacques Barrot, vice president of the European Commission, said that the decree aims to make sure that EU countries are ready to fight cyber crime.

Professor Peter Sommer, an expert on cyber crime at the London School of Economics, doubts that this strategy will increase the number of police hacking.

“All products are already there, they are available for a long time and are quite complex, most likely they will not be used very widely,” he said in a statement to the BBC.

Most antiviruses and firewalls will detect an attempt to penetrate, because they are designed to prevent the launch of remote access applications and trojans that are used by hackers, and police hackers, too, he explained.

Professor Sommer also noted that evidence obtained through hacking is very difficult to use in court because the prosecution is required to prove their genuineness.

“Usually, during the judicial search of computers, special attention is paid to ensure that nothing was written to the computer during the search,” said Professor Sommer. "Once you resort to a remote connection, it becomes uncontrollable."

And you say we have a police state.

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