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Tuesday, 01 July 2008 |
 pizza to go by autotelic London, UK.
Rumoured plans for a massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and connection made on the internet by the public in Britain have been criticised by the country's Information Commissioner Richard Thomas who has called for wider debate of the Government's plans warning that 'lines must be drawn to defend fundamental liberties ' , claiming there needed to be full public debate on the justification for such a wide ranging database and that compiling a database on the communications of the entire population would be a ' step too far from the British way of life".
Commissioner Thomas raised his concerns about the rumoured plans in his annual report . For its part the UK Government although unwilling to be drawn on the specifics of the national communications database it has in mind , has defended mass data harvesting as a means to combat terrorism and crime and has clearly indicated that it will be seeking more wide sweeping powers to intercept communications and brush aside current safeguards in its Communications Data Bill in November.
Commissioner Thomas said "Do we really want the police, security services and other organs of the state to have access to more and more aspects of our private lives?" and its not the first time the Commissioner has used his role to openly question whether we are sleepwalking into a surveilance society on the other hand, the fact that modern technonolgy makes it so easy to harvest sift and sort (MapReduce) data and that tech giants like Google are already doing this with the help of carriers and service providers for advertising reasons means we've already sleepwalked a great distance into the problem and its a fair bet t that Governments are also looking at sorting out communications data for revenue generating reasons as well. Personal information is a commodity. Its highly likely anyway that UK Government will manipulate concerns about the war on terror and fear of crime to get its way and that whatever safeguards are put in place will be largely cosmetic.
US Citizens should not lapse into a ' It couldnt possibly happen here ' frame of mind either as the NSA is already compiling a database of landline, mobile phone , email communication and net access usage for millions of Americans who have committed no crime and this may well be beefed up to match the UK Governments plans. Perhaps the NSA database is already there, who really knows?
It used to be that our worst 1984 nightmares required a huge number of compliant faceless bureaucrats to keep tabs on us but of course in the information age algorithms can be devised to crunch large amounts of data on remote servers into narrow fields of interest , even down to use and repetition of specific words across a population and then closely analysie the myriad of patterns and relationships between the people who use them for evidence of something, eh, wrong. .
Ever had a phone conversation or e-mail exchange you wouldnt necessarily want to have in public?
If yes you'd better get used to whispering out of the corner of your mouth on dark street corners with your collar turned up as war on terror and law and order initatives have a nasty way of morphing into yet more top down state control but chances are you have nothing to hide....Right?
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Last Updated ( Friday, 01 August 2008 )
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