UK Plans More Spying On Internet Users Under 'Terrorism' Pretext 189
Wowsers writes "In vogue with other countries cracking down on freedom and democracy on the internet as discussed in Slashdot recently, the UK is joining in with plans to track all phone calls, text messages, email traffic and websites visited online, all to be stored in vast databases under new government anti-terror plans. As reported in The Telegraph, security services will have access to information about who has been communicating with each other on social networking sites such as Facebook, direct messages between subscribers on Twitter would also be stored, as well as communications between players in online video games. The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the ex-Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information. The idea was later dropped in favor of requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers' expense."
Laundering for the GCHQ? (Score:4, Interesting)
So they hope a Communications Capabilities Development Programme can make the links in open court based on info that the GCHQ "found" and then flagged?
Your interest in politics was not a flaged but your friend had a friend who said something on twitter or downloaded something and they "stumbled" back to you?
The GCHQ tried "sigint NEW Systems" back in the late 1990's, the Government Telecommunications Advisory Centre, Government Technical Assistance Centre (criminals used codes) ect.
Strange that all this is now so direct and in the open? Everything you do is now can be tracked if your flagged, months of logs can be "opened" and real time use spied on for a long time with very little legal oversight in the USA, UK, Australia....
Why would anyone of interest use the web in any way worth logging anymore?
Back to family, cult, faith, school, tribe, gang, compatriots, business associates - MI6 will be detected long before they can plant a fresh face or bribe their way to something of use.
Why is the UK is giving away generations of hidden signals intelligence excellence for some short term "communications industry" links and PR that they are doing something?
Blah-blah-bureaucrats - what fancy ideas.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The story could be summarized, roughly, as so: Bureaucrats continue a new iteration of an old legacy in developing a further exaggerated sense of state control, in response to a perceived sense of national threat - this time, endeavoring to revoke some of the citizen's newer liberties, in endeavoring to develop (and substitute, therewith) a notion of "State-owned personal privacy" (TM)
(DNRTA)
I'd like to believe that the pragmatic arguments against it will be enough. I'm not familiar with the UK's own governmental charters, so I cannot argue more to the principles of the matter. I'm sure that the Open Rights Group might be able to chime in on the matter, though. Cheers to them.
Re:How far do we go to fight terrorism? (Score:5, Interesting)
If fighting terrorism involves violating people's rights I suspect we're going to breed a lot more terrorists.
The cost to tax payers (Score:4, Interesting)
What I care more about is the amount of tax pounds my lovely Con-Dem Gov't is going to pay to Crapita or HP/EDS to build some half baked IT system to store this stuff. The record of big IT projects in the UK is piss poor. They've wasted £11bn (£11,000,000,000) on the National Health Service project for IT and currently don't have anything to show for that wastage.
Re:The cost to tax payers (Score:5, Interesting)
Shutting everybody up ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... brought to you by your lovely government. You may think of it as of some kind of conspiracy theory but we are here. Degradation of our freedom of speech is directly linked with degradation of our (western) economic system and in my opinion this is just the beginning as long-term economic deterioration shows no signs of slowing down.
Governments (and their corporate sponsors) always wanted to shut down or marginalize independent media that show the world as it is, not as government + corporate oligarchy wants us to see. But freedom of speech was too deeply embedded in our culture and social costs associated with such moves tended to be too high compared to potential gains. Everything changed last year. Since Arab Spring and subsequent Occupy protests spreading like a wildfire, traditional media losing credibility caught again and again (thanks to blatant lies & omissions) and deteriorating economy pushing more and more people onto streets, our ruling class realized that time is running out.
Efforts to shut everybody up went into turbo mode last year - SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, tens of bigger or smaller initiatives in various countries. Sadly, I expect that this year will be even worse. I expect further economic deterioration as most of world economy is dying under crushing debt with no chances of discharging it (thanks to our corrupt politicians and their sponsors), let alone paying it off (we don't have enough natural resources to pay it off!). Ongoing financial "world-war" Jim Rickards writes about in his excelent book makes things even worse. What we desperately need is a round of healthy (if possible - orderly) defaults that will clean up most of this debt (odious or not) and let the economy restart. Iceland took this route and now they have real, healthy recovery with good prospects in the future. Note how silent our corporate media are about Iceland. Greece on the other hand is being fucked the same latin american style used in 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Once again corporate media blatantly lie about this urgent 'need of austerity' and 'Greeks fault' but when you look at it closer - it's good old, well tested latino scenario which turned up to be fraud long time ago. Thanks to banksters and their stooges (that is, politicians) few years from now Greece will become a regular 3-rd world country.
My sad feeling is that in order to keep current (broken) system running our ruling elites will block any possibilities to resolve this situation and will cover up all frauds and crimes of themselves and their friends. Economic situation will slowly deteriorate until must of us reach 3-rd world conditions and our ruling elites will treat us with Radio-Yerevan-style propaganda backed by cooked economic numbers to show how wonderfully great our economy is, completely ignoring reality for 99% of citizens. All voices of dissent will be silenced, marginalized, blatantly censored or marked as "terrorists" and held in jail.
Welcome to 'iron fist' phase every civilization comes through before it dies (yet it's still not too late to overturn this).
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
The state doing it is more likely to cost more. Also, they're more likely to have delays, cost overruns and just drop
the whole idea when they cant get it to work after 5 years and £200million wasted.