UK Taps 439,000 Phones, Now Wants To Monitor MPs

JPMH writes "With the largest density of CCTV cameras in the world, and an increasing network of automatic number-plate recognition cameras on main roads, Britain has long been a pioneer for the surveillance society. Now new official figures reveal that UK agencies monitored 439,000 telephones and email addresses in a 15 month period between 2005 and 2006. The Interception of Communications Commissioner is seeking the right for agencies to be allowed to monitor the communications of Members of Parliament as well, something which has been forbidden since the 1960s. It must be that it is bringing their numbers down: on the law of averages they should be monitoring at least 5 of the MPs."

Comments

Oh please let them be monitored

[LiquidCoooled]

See how they like it.

Re:Oh please let them be monitored

[Elemenope]

You do realise that there is no amorphous blob called the police? You realise that the police are made up of a bunch of people, some of whom are very competent, some of whom are less so. This is why the police can do one job well, and one job badly, because there were different police in handling the issue.

'Tis true that police departments are composed of diverse sorts of individuals of varying levels of competence. However, particular departments can encourage development of certain ways of doing things, certain professional culture, through policies, hiring criteria, and subtler social pressures, such that the vast majority of the officers will behave in a predictable way given the same circumstances. The quality of that behavior depends upon those policies and what the interior culture is.

At the University I attend, there are two neighboring towns which have substatial contact with the students. They have separate police departments, and while they are all individuals as you say, I have a reasonable expectation of being treated fairly by an officer from one of those towns, and not so much from the other. Occassionally I am pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised, but not often. I suspect it has a lot to do with differences of priority, different internal cultures, and probably even different policies.

So many people on slashdot seem to have difficulty in dealing with groups of people. I guess it makes it easier to argue.

The formation of categories and identification of general delineations and trends are crucial to thought and discussion. I agree it can be done well or poorly, and some folks are better at it than others. The trick is to identify which factors of distinction are important and which are trivial. Not always easy, and easy thus to err on the side of excluding something important in the generalization.

Fuck this...

[Ckwop]

May I be the first to say holy fucking shit. I mean, I knew it was bad. I once counted three hundred or so security cameras on a trip around Liverpool but I never once suspected that we had it anywhere near this bad.

And these goons want a road-pricing scheme via GPS tracking? Jesus f-ing Christ. Next they'll want to photograph people in toilets in case they decide to take drugs in them. They really are that bat-shit crazy!

My Grandma died last year of cancer. She was one of the brave women that gunned down German planes over Widnes during World War II. Their generation's sacrifice, every single last one of them appears to be in vein. For we've become the very thing we fought sixty years ago. How did this happen? How did we let ourselves be cowed in to this?

The faceless little shits behind this will never be known. Their crimes will never go punished.

Any Canadians willing to sponsor a immigrating Brit?

Simon

Re:Fuck this...

[zeoslap]

>> How did this happen? How did we let ourselves be cowed in to this?

One word. Alcohol. The alcohol based culture of the UK causes both street crime and traffic fatalities so you end up with cameras in the streets and cameras on the roads, perhaps it also leads to numbed citizens that don't really care as well (debatable).

I lived in the UK till I was twenty and it's only when you leave and look back that you see just how much people drink there.

Re:Put your money where your mouth is, Tom.

[Jeremi]

I don't need advanced CCTV cameras to violate your rights. Get that through your head.

Of course not. But it sure makes it a lot easier to do it wholesale.

In the real world, things aren't determined by what is theoretically possible, but by what is economically feasible. Ubiquitous CCTV cameras make wide-scale person tracking economically feasible, and that is the key.

By analogy: You don't need a nuclear bomb to kill everyone in Chicago.... given enough time and effort, you could do it with a machete. But once you have a nuclear bomb, it becomes a whole lot more likely that you can pull it off, and thus a whole lot more likely that you will try.