UK Government To Demand Data On Every Call, Email, and Tweet 199
judgecorp writes "The UK government is proposing a law that would require phone and Internet companies to store information on all communications, and hand it to the security services when required. The Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) abandoned by the last government is back on the table, proposed as a means to increase security, and likely to be pushed through before the Olympics in London, according to reports."
Re:That'll be the scheme opposed by the CURRENT lo (Score:0, Interesting)
That's a side effect of two-party/adversarial politics. The party in power only opposes stuff because they see it as their job to. If the current government proposed a law outlawing the mistreatment of kittens Labour would probably find an angle to argue against it. It's because party politics isn't about serving the people any more (if it ever was), it's about beating the other party at the next election, and that means scoring points wherever possible.
The only thing more depressing than a situation where one side opposes the exact same thing they supported when on the other side of the chamber, is when both sides agree on something, and it gets rushed through without any of the issues being examined.
Close, but not quite. It's an effect of both parties really being the same party behind the scenes. They only pretend to be fighting each other to give the silly voters the illusion that voting for the other set of scum might change something.
Things will only change when the citizens march on the legislative bodies and kill the legislators. Which means it will never happen, because we've all lost the killer's edge that our ancestors had. Oh well, it was such a nice civilization while it lasted.
Re:UK is no different than the rest of the world (Score:5, Interesting)
did you just compare CCTV inside of stores to CCTV in public spaces... seriously?
You know all those statistics you hear about how many cameras there are in the UK -- originally they said 4.2 million, but more recently that figure has been debunked and replaced with one around 1.5 million -- you do realise they include store cameras, right? In fact, that almost all of them are store cameras.
There are only around 60,000 public cameras in the UK. The largest deployment is London's (10,000 cameras - similar to the size of the deployment in Chicago, with a population less than a quarter the size of London's). The remaining 50,000 are scattered across around 800 smaller deployments. Most towns don't have any.
It's harder to find information on US deployments. Chicago, as mentioned, has about 10,000, with the mayor expressing a desire to "put one on every street corner". New York also has a large deployment (3,000 - larger than any in the UK outside of London). Beyond these, figures become scarce. A number of cities published figures for trial installation sizes in the region of 30-50 cameras, but it isn't clear whether these deployments were increased in size beyond this. It seems likely that there are similar numbers of public cameras in the US versus UK (although probably not on a per-capita basis).