New-Labour’s developing fascist state moves a little closer as it’s Ministers consider plans for a vast and intrusive database of electronic information. A real move in the direction of a sinister total surveillance society.
Their plan is for New-Labour to legislate to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and telephone companies to pass the details of all emails and telephone calls to them to be stored in a gargantuan database.
Their current justification is national security, a marvellous excuse to make the gullible grateful for their own oppression, but if they couldn’t talk that up then they would probably look to find some other reason.
A Home Office ‘spokesman’ claimed retaining communications information is now apparently essential for protecting national security. He also insisted that powers to hold information were subject to strict safeguards.
Yes, but somehow with other legislation and systems it has still resulted in things like local councils spying on ordinary people over schools admissions, people getting criminal records for putting a little too much rubbish in their bins and the private data of huge numbers of people being lost, or given away, or even published on the internet. These safeguards and promises are clearly utterly worthless.
In fact the prime minister’s personal representative has publicly admitted that "manifesto pledges are not subject to legitimate expectation", so it is curious they expect us to actually believe any such lesser assurances.
The state claims that if only they can bring in this law, restrict that freedom, then they can make the citizen safe. It is a lie. They can not guarantee safety, not from chance, not from natural disaster, not from crime and not from terrorism. They can even genuinely try, but sooner or later they are sill bound to fail.
Quite frankly I would rather take the chance of not making it easier to catch and more problematically convict terrorists (because they are easier to foil than catch and easier to catch than convict) than to allow them change my society to the point where it no longer reflects values I would be willing to defend. That is one of the aims of terrorism.
Are we are reaching the point where the state is in danger of becoming a greater menace to out liberties, values and way of life than terrorism.
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3 comments:
One should remember that the amount of data this would involve would be absolutely vast. Added to the fact that encryption would become commonplace as a result; yes they could decrypt that data but the processing power required if even 20% of traffic was encrypted would cripple the system.
Then there is the history of government IT projects to consider…
Bluster!
You may be right. In Fact I do hope your are right, then it will be mostly a colossal waste of taxpayer’s money.
But they betray what they are by their enthusiasm for this sort of thing.
It's what they will do with the data that worries me.
Big Brother wants to watch over us...
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