Slashdot Mirror
Total Phone and Email Database Proposed In UK
mishmash writes "The Times of London is reporting a proposal for a massive government database holding details of all phone calls, emails, and time spent on the Internet. This is to be justified as being 'part of the fight against crime and terrorism.' Quoting: 'Internet service providers and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials.' If you want to write to representatives to let them know your views, contact details are available at Write to Them." UK telecoms are already required to keep records of phone calls and text messages for 12 months, accessible by subpoena; the requirement is already slated to expand to records of Internet usage, emails, and VoIP. This new proposal aims to centralize all that information in a single database in the Home Office.
But how about a much cheaper and effective method of keeping the UK safe from Teh Terrorists:
1. Stop supporting Israeli terrorism
2. Stop acting the lapdog to the United States rampaging through the Middle East in an effort to secure oil resources and pipelines and wacky Christian end of world judegement day type crazyness.
Often the fact that you communicated with a certain individual is suspicious enough, especially if encryption was used. You don't necessarily need to know what was said to learn a lot of useful information.
In fact, if you can get enough people to write in fearing some sort of massive problem, any bill that can be seen to have the slightest association with that fear, no matter how much the original fear was inflated, will never come to pass.
My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
Because history shows that a negative public reaction will make them think twice. The whole point of this "leak" is to test that public opinion, and allows MPs to avoid thorny questions. Frankly, being called a paranoid kook is preferable to being on a database.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Being a U.S.-centric site, a lot of vitriol gets directed towards the US government around here (and so it should in relation to many laws and policies relating to "terrorism" and "security").
But what on earth is going on in the UK? Security cameras literally everywhere, compulsory DNA databases, laws permitting detention without charge or trial for long periods of time, that insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament), and this obsession with centralising government control over information, particularly insofar as it relates to the movements and communications of private citizens. The list goes on and on.
Britain stood virtually alone against fascism in World War Two, and was a bastion against the totalitarian Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Before then the UK resisted the power of the Catholic church, eliminated any real power for its despotic monarchs, and even briefly pioneered the field of total republican independence from hereditory rule, later embraced by some more celebrated republics. Before any of that you managed to write the Magna Carta, perhaps the greatest document on the rights of the individual in human history.
Why did you even bother, only to willingly turn yourselves into a bureaucractic authoritarian state? Sure, you're not murdering millions of your citizens in gas chambers, but you're only a hop, skip and a jump away from East Germany under the Stasi - total state surveillance and the tyranny of a huge, opaque executive government where faceless "officials" control the lives of citizens.
Wake up, before it's too late.
Read Pynchon.
This is the first comment I read. I do not need to go any further before saying that you are not only right, but have put forth the truth in such an eloquent manner.
History does repeat itself, or so they say.
1700-1900 is NOT that long of a time span at all in the grand scheme of things. Now consider all of the world changing events we saw in just two hundred years. The change saw are almost unimaginable by even the most creative of minds. What will another 200 years and scarce resources bring?
I do not think even the most intellectual of us can fathom what the world will look like in a hundred years. If it comes down to it, the police state WILL be enforced if deemed necessary, and it will all be already in place ready to go...
We think we are so different from those before us, but are you so naive to think that they did not feel the same way about their previous generations?
It really is time to get up and do something if you live in the UK. This kind of stuff makes me feel good to be in the US... for once.
It sounds like that we are moving to the state of "Pre-crime" where we will be charged with suspicious activity even when no crime has yet been committed.
All they need now is some curfews and laws against private gatherings.
If I were British I would be considerably more afraid of my government than any terrorist. Believe me. I am. And when we raise our concerns, they ignore us and do what they want anyway. Learn this, we are no longer a democracy (rule of the majority), we're a totalitarianistic state. The vote is just something they 'allow' us to have because it appeases the masses. And please don't mod this down unless you actually live in the UK. I WISH this were a flamebait or a troll. I really do.
I emigrated from the UK to Australia five years ago, because basically, as one tradesman-type person said to me very succinctly before I left: "Yeah, Don't blame yer mate, it's all fucked, innit?".
And it is. It's not just the government though - it's also overpopulation, and the fact the the average Brit is happy to work all hours for faceless corps who don't give a fuck about them, because they're all up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt (and are led to believe that owning ones own house is the be-all and end-all of existence, so it's all worth it really). Towns are unfriendly and jammed with cars - there are now so many cars you can't move for the fucking things, being used or just parked. Housing estates are horrible hideous anonymous places with bad architecture, built so shoddily and close together that everyone's at each others' throats about the noise and where everyone shuns their neighbours because there is just no fucking privacy anymore. Simple fact - 60 million people and counting simply do not FIT into the British Isles.
People pay insane prices for food and other basic needs, and put up with crap quality because they have gradually forgotten what good quality IS. Supermarkets have taken over every town and turned them all into identikit clones of each other - distinguishable only by the small differences in their dysfunctional traffic-saturated ring-road systems. And what are the supermarkets full of? Ready meals full of chemicals - for FUCKS sake Britain, cook your own food!
There's no pride in anything - ones work, ones environment, ones town, and nobody actually makes anything anymore - it's all "service industry" whatever the fuck that means, what 'industry'?
I don't believe in conspiracy theories generally, (after all, conspiracies require competence, and that's a precious commodity these days), but if some shady organisation had wanted to hatch a plot (in the 1960s, say) to turn Britain into a sleepwalking nation of compliant consumers that took any old shit thrown at them with a shrug, they could not have done better than what has actually taken place since then. Britain can be a beautiful place, and it has its good points, and good people, but as a nation it's lost its soul. Very sad. WAKEY WAKEY!!!