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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.
Huh? Isn't it obvious; so they can lose the entire database in the post.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
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.
Every month or two I make it a point to send a few long emails encrypted with PGP and with suggestive subject lines like "Schematics for trigger device" and "The Revolution Starts Now" to my Gmail or Hotmail account. The message content is just pasted Chuck Norris jokes, so if someone decides to spend some time and energy breaking the encryption at least they'll have something to read.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
Nobody seems to hate the concept of terrorism as much as the Brits -
I would like to see us have an Osama Bin ladin day where we burn his effigy to fireworks and general celebration
- and Guy fawkes never actually carried out the gunpowder plot
AND nobody seems to forget the bloody goverment reprisals that have taken place under the guidance of the old Kings and Queens, mostly due to religious differences. here I name but a few:
The rampage of Bloody Bonner during the reign of Queen Mary I
The Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys in the reign of King James II
The repression in Scotland against the highlanders after the first Jacobite rebellions which some historians have called genocide
The Peterloo Massacre in 1819
Have the English forgot all of these thousands of government killings and yet still remember Guy Fawkes who did not manage to kill a single person?
If I were British I would be considerably more afraid of my government than any terrorist.
Watching Sky news (one of the two main news stations) earlier today they referred to the data retention law as an EU law, but that isn't entirely correct.
When the UK was president of the EU it brought in Europe wide data retention laws. It was shortly after 7/7 and managed to get enough votes to be passed.
When an EU law is passed the member states implement it in their own way (all member states are required their phone companies / ISP's to log phone / internet data for at least 6 months, some do longer).
So while this is technically an EU law, it was brought into Europe by predominantly by the UK.
Allowing the data to be stored by the government is a new, UK only law.
Mr.Orwell! A telephone call for Mr.Orwell ....
Maybe something like this.
Loudspeaker: Paging Mr.Orwell. Mr.Orwell to the nearest white courtesy phone.
Orwell: Hmmm... Ok.... Um... there's a sign here that says 'Courtesy Phone', but the phone is black.
Loudspeaker: No, the courtesy phone is white.
Orwell: No, it's black.
Loudspeaker: It's white.
Orwell: It's black. It's the same color as my suit and watchband.
Loudspeaker: I don't know how you could be so mistaken. It's clearly white.
Orwell: How can you not know your black courtesy phones are black?
Loudspeaker: It's white.
Orwell: It's black.
Loudspeaker: Paging the nearest Civil Protection Team. Civil Protection Team to the nearest white courtesy phone.
They already went there, believe me. Go to The Pirate Bay and get the movie "Taking Liberties" - it's a documentary about what the current government has done to the UK.
They have a clip of Tony Blair saying that he knows a whole class of people who will grow up to be be criminals and ought to be registered as such *pre-birth*.
No sig today...
Completely incorrect. If you are even arrested for a "recordable offence" (which most are) your DNA can be taken, and kept even if you aren't charged, (or even if the arrest was completely baseless). The only place where it is automatically destroyed is in Scotland, which is may be what you are thinking of.
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
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!!!