In a move that can only be described as Orwellian, the British Government is making preparations to build a database that will monitor every single email, website visit and phone call made in Britain. Tie this in with their massive CCTV network and the proposed ID card scheme and you have a violation of civil liberties no less disturbing than the Great Firewall of China.
I have problems with this on a number of levels:
- It suspends any form of privacy.
- It goes against the presumption of innocence.
- There is no way to guarantee the security of any information that is stored online.
- It is open to abuse.
The stated aim of the database is to reduce the ability for terrorists to communicate, but I don’t think that you need to be a member of the tin foil hat set to be worried by this. If the database were to be infiltrated it could create all kinds of problems. It is a potential goldmine for blackmailers and corporate espionage, not to mention the fact that someone who has not committed or suspected of any crime should not be subject to investigation. This is lazy police-work at its worst. I sincerely hope that the idea never sees the light of day.[The Age]
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Tags: privacy-invasion, scary, Security, uk
2 responses
May 23, 2008 at 7:04 am
There’s one other thing wrong with this proposal: to make it work and return useful data, you’d need to build a version of the Google File System and search system that works several times faster than that which Google use, and which stores a couple of orders of magnitude more data.
This is not feasible, not even remotely.
Furthermore, it is pretty much useless for any useful purpose, and doesn’t even do much to help the common person in the UK. Terrorism in the UK is rare and unusual, and most of the current crop of incompetents were mostly harmless anyway.
The current problem in the UK is lawlessness caused by an overly bureaucratic policing system which costs too much, and punishes too little and offers way too little scope for actually catching criminals.
May 23, 2008 at 10:22 am
Dan H.
Terrorism just about anywhere is rare and unusual, but the UK has had more than its share of it. If you recall their troubles with the IRA in the past.
Packet sniffing is perfectly feasible and with cooperation from ISPs it could be implemented.
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