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Government Privacy Security United Kingdom Your Rights Online

UK Gov't Creating Secret Mega Database On Citizens Without Informing Parliament (theregister.co.uk) 70

Alexander J Martin, reporting for The Register: The Home Office is secretly creating a centralised database on the good folk of Britain without presenting the capability increases to the public or subjecting them to Parliamentary scrutiny. The Register can reveal the project, which was described as simply a "replatforming" of the department's aging IT infrastructure, has already begun to roll out, with the "first wave" of changes being delivered in what it is calling the Technology Platforms for Tomorrow (TPT) programme. TPT will lay the foundations for this mega database by ushering in "core infrastructure, compute platforms and Live Service capability" changes, primarily using Hadoop, the open source software framework for centralising databases and allowing batch queries and analyses to be run across them in bulk.
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UK Gov't Creating Secret Mega Database On Citizens Without Informing Parliament

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  • don't need to know.
    • by starless ( 60879 )

      don't need to know.

      But British citizens do.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • What about the bad folk? Is Santa Claus putting them on his naughty list instead?
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @11:21AM (#52243025)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The UK, providing inspiration to authors like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, et al. A country driving dreams of dystopia everywhere. Even the USA eyes the UK with police state envy with respect to the scope of domestic surveillance of its citizenry. Does anyone know what temperature paper burns at?
    • Does anyone know what temperature paper burns at?

      911 degrees Fahrenheit

    • by pr0nbot ( 313417 )

      I wonder if this is one of the costs of imperialism/multiculturalism. You import all manner of grievances, festering in segregated communities with which you have no informal ties through which you might do information gathering. All of a sudden, rather than dealing with the customary crimes you're dealing with invisible, existential threats from within your borders. You don't know how to build intelligence networks in the ghettos -- you don't know their customs, their tongues, their codes, and so whom you

      • by dave420 ( 699308 )

        No. Your strange fantasies about "ghettos" have no bearing on the matter at all. Intelligence gathering the old fashioned way is becoming more and more rare because it's expensive and difficult to perform. It yields the best intelligence by far - like, actual real, useful intelligence, but it appears we've settled for less useful intelligence at a greater cost to society, but with a smaller budget for the departments footing the bill. Yay us?

  • THIS IS JUST WRONG! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Thud457 ( 234763 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @11:36AM (#52243191) Homepage Journal
    WTF UKGOV?!!!

    YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO SPY ON YOUR CITIZENS!

    The way it is SUPPOSED to work is that all five eyes countries spy on each others' citizens, then share their data with each other.
    So this should be America spying on UK citizens.
    Or Australia.
    Or New Zealand.
    Or sorry, Canada.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This data isn't gathered through spying, it's stuff that citizens have to give the government like tax information, voter registration, employment data, car ownership data...

      It's just standard abuse of databases, with zero regard for privacy or safety. Just wait until it gets hacked.

    • Commonwealth baby!
  • by Anonymous Coward

    That last Bond film?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    God snoop the Queen.

  • So, they ALREADY collect, have, keep, access this data, it's just that they have decided to use modern methods to better access it?

    In other words, this is not a new problem, it's been going on for many years, they are just upgrading their IT?

    I'm shocked. SHOCKED I TELL YOU!, this from a government that has CCTV and license plate readers on every single street corner everywhere in their country, and have for many years.

  • I'm surprised they don't already have something like this in place honestly.

    Can't the NSA already do something similar over here in the US or is it much more disorganized? Either way, the future is getting pretty scary to think about. I hate to think about what my kids are going to have to put up with in their 30's if tech continues to advance at the current pace. 1984 wasn't supposed to be an operations manual. It was supposed to be a warning.

  • by Diss Champ ( 934796 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @12:17PM (#52243579)

    The story would have been a lot more interesting.

  • by thinkwaitfast ( 4150389 ) on Friday June 03, 2016 @02:45PM (#52244837)
    Didn't talk of secret government databases on people used to be reserved for people who talked to themselves on buses? Interesting to see this going mainstream.

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