A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials. The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.
The proposal will raise further alarm about a “Big Brother” society, as it follows plans for vast databases for the ID cards scheme and NHS patients.
There will also be concern about the ability of the Government to manage a system holding billions of records. About 57 billion text messages were sent in Britain last year, while an estimated 3 billion e-mails are sent every day.
















Concern about the ability to handle this? They can't handle squat now, without screwing everything up!!
... Sounds like my tax money hard at work. Why does the government consider each member of the public a terrorist by default? I'm not going to blow up the world, and even if I was going to, I wouldn't use electronic forms of communication knowing this!
... And how is this database going to handle email spam? I'm pretty sure there's a big hole in the plan right there.
The only people benefiting from schemes like this are companies that make encryption software. I can't wait for the government to change, New Labour have just ****ed this country
Read the Bible and you'll know exactly where we are headed.
Whew, I'm glad that is in Europe and not the US!
Read the Bible and you'll know exactly where we are headed.
Whew, I'm glad that is in Europe and not the US!
Well the U.S. just haven't admitted to doing the same thing but you know they do and they don't have to tell anyone about it. They're probably selling the technology used to gather and manage so much data. They even famously fried their entire computer system in 2000 as they were so overwhelmed with the data they were trying to sort through the info in their queues.
Meanwhile all of you sit on your asses, complain and comment on teh Interweb without doing **** against what your government is doing to you, waiting for that big change in politics that never happens. Hey, go outside and wave and smile into that CCTV cam, will ya? :p
Yea, because that's not the case yet...
but it's ok... it's all about "freedom", "democracy", and "terrorism"
The actual terrorism and crime that they are trying in vain to stop...
...or their "1984 + V For Vendetta" ways of monitoring and spying on civilians and blatantly breaking privacy laws!
So the govenment is gonna spend loads of tax payer cash on a worthless database when they should be spending that money on fixing and getting togeather a Medical / NHS database which would be far more worthwhile.
I find it incredible that for a small island if i walk into any hospital they can't simply tap in my name and get basic let alone large amounts of information on my medical history.
Damn government, ill be glad when someone else gets in.
But seriously, something this unconstitutional won't last long.
When you give up freedom for security, you lose both.
ECHELON
all too real
however, this will definitely increase the number of hacktivists everywhere
Last edited by dysmatik on 21 May 2008 - 17:49
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.