The Bobbies are going to begin warrantless online snooping

Thanks to a new EU rule, British "authorities" are now free to root around in the computers of their subjects, and they only have to come up with the flimsiest of excuses in order to do so.

Actually, since it's an EU directive, any country in the EU is free to dispatch its police to muck around in the hard drives of any of its member nations' citizens.

"Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property"

Who wants to bet that it won't be "rarely used" from now on? Governments have rarely if ever been granted a power that they didn't immediately abuse.

Here's the incredibly low threshold that must be met in order to allow the warrantless secret searches:

"A remote search can be granted if a senior officer says he “believes” that it is “proportionate” and necessary to prevent or detect serious crime — defined as any offence attracting a jail sentence of more than three years."

The operative word in that statement is "prevent". By definition, that means that no crime has been committed, yet the cops are still apparently empowered to conduct these searches, in some kind of random casting about for "maybe going to be committed someday" acts.

That means, if I've got this correctly, that if some cop in charge "believes" that he can "prevent" some nebulous unnamed crime by intruding into someone's personal life, even with no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing by that user, then he can invoke this rule and everything will be nice and legal.

The only problem with that is, of course you can prevent crimes by randomly searching thousands and thousands of computers for the one that's being used (or potentially going to be used) for criminal activity. One can also accomplish much the same results by searching thousands and thousands of houses as well. Is that level of intrusiveness next to be approved by Brussels? After all, it's the logical next step, as wrong as it is.

Fortunately for U.S. citizens, we defeated that kind of scheme in this country back in 1993. Does anyone remember Bill Clinton's famous Clipper Chip, which would have allowed back-door access into any American computer by law enforcement? That sort of hardware would have made it much easier on the Europeans of today, who apparently aren't above committing hacker crimes in order to gain access to their targets:

"Police might also send an e-mail to a suspect’s computer. The message would include an attachment that contained a virus or “malware”. If the attachment was opened, the remote search facility would be covertly activated."

Any Americans still wish to be in some kind of world government after hearing about this kind of nonsense?

Residents of England who still care about their privacy, I suggest you decline to open attachments from anyone you don't trust, and immediately employ an encryption solution in order to protect your personal information from being hoovered up by some nosy gendarme who simply feels like doing so. I use and recommend Cryptainer, which is inexpensive and offers the strongest levels of encryption available, as well as being incredibly easy to use (Just don't lose your passphrase, or you're toast). They even offer a free version to try (No, I don't have any financial interest in the product. I just think it works great).