Home Office plans to create ‘Big brother’ database for phones calls, emails and web use
[Quote:]
The Home Office will create a database to store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year under plans currently under discussion, it has emerged.
The Government wants to create the system to fight terrorism and crime. The police and security services believe it will make it easier to access important data as communications become more complex.
Telecoms firms and internet service providers (ISPs) have already been approached by the Home Office, which would be given customer records if the plans were realised.
The security services and police would then be able to access records for any individual over the previous 12 months by gaining permission through the courts.
Or simply access the records. Without asking the courts.
Well, we’ve been there, I faintly remember the same Britain accusing the Soviet Union and the Communist countries of being “police states” and “dictatorships” for doing the same stuff.
When I visited the quoted page, the top comment in the Recent comments list was ” Why Are So Many Britons Emigrating?” The article about the Home Office’s plans to snoop on all communications (including this one, presumably) gives a very clear answer to that question. The current Labour government of the UK seems determined to turn itself into the enemy of its citizens.
These plans are always put together by people with no clue. Anybody who is doing something that these law enforcement agencies might be interested in would be encrypting their email (or perhaps just encoding it). And they’re probably already using VoIP services for calls since those can also be encrypted, and are much harder to trace.
Plans like this just affect innocent people, much like banning water bottles at the airports. And if they do implement it, they’ll probably just find more people start using encryption, which makes the terrorists’ traffic blend in even better.