In order to do what they are suggesting they need to do behavioural analysis, string analysis and so on and so forth.

This is very similar to what you need to do to bloc spam. So this is what I am suggesting. First they fix the spam issue and prove that their analysis work.

May I suggest a simple solution? Have a computer connect to the cop and sense if he 'feels' someone if guilty, if the led goes green that will then be taken as undeniable evidence and you get 2 years in prison.
I know it's very similar like how things are done now, but with this slight alteration you can point at a machine and say 'sorry but computers don't lie'.
Technically the thing can just sense skin resistance to see if the cop is calm and confident, and use that as evidence

Oh. The Yavolees would be pleased to work on this "more to search" government cash cow. "Email me immediately and we’ll send in the cavalry", says Ballmer: "I’m joking...but I’m not."
The economic period we're in now is going to prove the questionable value of search... DRM is the future.
The powers you give me I will lay down when this crisis has be abated! Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen. PeU, we can have those punters in prism, in no time. Please take a chair and the Microsoft Surface to Surface stable, and we'll get straight down to the BSOD.

O_O

I am so glad I don't live in the UK anymore. The fact they're even talking about intrusive bullshit like this is frightening.

...was not supposed to be an instruction manual on governance.

And nor can McMurdie.

Having had the experience of destroying data on a hard drive (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda), it takes a heck of a long time. Okay, reading is probably a bit faster than writing, but probably not by much when you're just streaming.

If Plod raids a house and finds five modern computers with anything like half-way decent hard-drives, he's going to be sat in the living room for a week just waiting for his tool to finish reading the disk!

Cheers,
Wol

The implementation could be an eprom chip, password protected, that contains the owners basic information.

Name, Address, Contact Number & date of *claimed* ownership; for desktops and the date is to record when the chip was programmed so if the PC is sold, the previous owner would reset the chip and the new owner would have it set. If its a desktop and it has in the address there is no harm.

For laptops, just a name, maybe even a service online so that all that is stored is a serial number which police can query against a database and find the owner.

Maybe something like this exists already and the Police are just being silly, I dunno but you ain't getting in my hard drive so easy coppers.

i do most of my best work about half way through a bottle of vodka or jack daniels. does this mean i'm going to get Mr plod knocking on my door when i'm working on my own machine? how would this work? or does being drunk within detectability of a computer become an offence too?

"...remotely searching hard drives over the Internet".

Now that is an interesting possibility. Would it fall under the laws that make "breaking into" a computer a criminal offence? Or, in the increasingly familiar way as the UK makes the transition to a police state, is it taken for granted that anything the police do is OK, even if it is "technically" illegal?