Taken from http://skew.dailyskew.com
Sorry it’s taken so long to write another post – I have a few half-started articles that I just haven’t got round to finishing but I had to say something about this.
I don’t know if you remember, but back in April Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, announced an idea that she and the Government wanted to put in place. Basically, she wanted official and Government bodies to be able to have access to your communication details. This means your telephone calls, emails, websites that you visit, text and picture messages, basically ANY electronic communication that you might make. This information would be stored by your telecommunications provider for a year and could be accessed by any one of 653 public bodies without a court order or judges permission, any senior official can grant it.
This would include 43 police forces in England & Wales, 8 police forces in Scotland, Police Service of Northern Ireland, British Transport Police, Port of Liverpool Police, Port of Dover Police, Royal Military Police, Royal Air Force Police, Civil Nuclear Constabulary, Ministry of Defence Police, Royal Navy Police, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Serious Organised Crime Agency, Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, United Kingdom Border Agency and The Prison Service as well as approximately 474 local authorities throughout the UK and approximately 110 *other* public authorities, including almost all government departments, including the Serious Fraud Office, Independent Police Complaints Commission, Charity Commission, Gambling Commission and Royal Mail to name only a few. (Taken from the No2ID website)
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. – George Orwell 1984
This legislation is exactly the same concept, the Government can plug in to your information whenever they want, they can see who you’ve spoken to, when and for how long, they can see when you went online and what websites you visited, and they can even see who you’re emailing. And the reason for this? To protect us all from Terrorism. In the words of Benjamin Franklin “People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.”
It is up to us, all of us, to stand up for our rights, the Government and Local Authorities have already proved that they can’t be trusted with this sort of power, using the powers they were previously given to spy on litterers and people who forgot to scoop their dog’s poop!
Sure, the Government might try to bring in guidelines to safeguard our privacy, but what will happen when the next Government is elected who change the guidelines “just a little”, and the next one, and the next one. What about when they decide that the Jews, or the Gays, or those people with disabilities are anathema, and they have a record of your web browsing, they have a record of your calls. I’m sorry to invoke Godwin’s Law but this IS the thin point of the wedge.
We have to stop this, and we have to do it now.
If you want to know more about this, or want to do something then there’s the CC Jacqui Smith group (who’ve gone a little quiet recently but I’m sure that’ll pick up soon) as well as the No2ID website. I’d also highly recommend reading the articles by TechnicalBloke.com, or Henry Porter’s excellent article on the subject in the Guardian.
