Posted on 07/16/2008 2:57:53 PM PDT by BGHater
Plans for a massive database snooping on the entire population were condemned yesterday as a ‘step too far for the British way of life’.
In an Orwellian move, the Home Office is proposing to detail every phone call, e-mail, text message, internet search and online purchase in the fight against terrorism and other serious crime.
But the privacy watchdog, Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, warned that the public’s traditional freedoms were under grave threat from creeping state surveillance.
Big Brother: Critics warn our surveillance culture is going too far
Apart from the Government’s inability to hold data securely, he said the proposals raised ‘grave questions’.
‘Do the risks we face provide justification for such a scheme in the first place? Do we want the state to have details of more and more aspects of our private lives?
‘Whatever the benefits, would such a scheme amount to excessive surveillance? Would this be a step too far for the British way of life?’
It is thought the scheme would allow the police or MI5 to access the exact time when a phone call was made, the number dialled, the length of the call and, in the case of mobile phones, the location of the handset to within an accuracy of a few hundred yards.
Similarly for e-mails, it would provide details of when they were sent and who the recipients were. Police recovering a suspect’s computer would then be able to trawl through hard-drive records and recover particular messages. The content of telephone calls could not be recovered unless they were being intercepted at the time.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
'The avalanche has already started. It is too late for pebbles to vote'
1984... in 2008
I’m actually surprised it took them so long. Once you’ve criminalized a law abiding persons’ right to self defense including lethal force, privacy issues become academic.
Clearly, the British government is paying no attention to my tag line.
V where are you?
They don't have guns, what can they do about it?
“detail every phone call, e-mail, text message, internet search and online purchase”. I’m agreed it’s wrong, but, the one thing I’ve never been able to get my arms around is the idea of the sheer, overwhelming, volume of data their talking about Detailing? And think of the bizarre, staggering cost to the taxpayers! For what? So they could “detail” my wife’s endless conversations with my mother-in-law about today’s soap opera episodes? Could any one ever parse through the volume of “crap” to catch the bad guy? Honestly, just because you have the technology, does “dumb” blind search trump “smart” search and good old “word of mouth”, cop on the beat leg work? Something about this just does not ring true. Instead, to be honest, it smells of “brother-in-law” deal with the gov’t, i.e., wink, wink, I got the software, Uncle has the hardware, get the gov’t to buy it and you can promise the latest in the ultimate “homeland” security monitoring system.
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