The UK government is now planning to keep a database of all the phone calls, emails and internet sessions of UK citizens, as part of the fight against crime and terrorism.

Before September 11th 2001 no UK government would dare try such a thing, but now the perceived threat of terrorism in the UK means that the people will probably stand for this.

This is not about the police, they already find it easy to get all this info, it’s about control of the people.

Take phone calls for example, all the UK phone companies have police liaison staff whose job is to provide police with information about phone calls, this can be used for intelligence gathering or for evidence.  The police may complain that the procedure required for getting data that can be used as evidence is slow due the the requirement of a court order, but there is a big difference between data that can be used for intelligence and investigation compared to data that can be used in evidence.  The later assumes that a case is going before a court anyway and we all know that cases can take years to get to court.

Slowly the rights of the individual are being taken away in the fight against terrorism, surely we need to stop and think about how real this threat really is?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 3:05 am and is filed under Crazy Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.