UK Outlines Plan For Internet Black Boxes

RobotsDinner writes "In what sounds like a dystopian sci-fi plot, the Home Office has made public plans to outfit the country's Internet with upstream data recorders to log pretty much everything that passes through. 'Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.'"

Comments

Re:I hate their lying ways

[Hatta]

What? 9/11, 7/7 and the Nadrid train bombings did actually happen. It absolutely is a real threat and there was even analysis of it as an emerging threat long before current governments started using it to push their agenda.

The threat is real, but the risk is negligible. How many people died due to terrorism in the US or UK in the past 10 years? How many people s died because they couldn't get health insurance? For that matter, how many people died because they slipped in the shower, or because they got food poisoning? Apparently 9000people per year die because of food poisoning. Why haven't we surrendered all our rights in a war on salmonella?

So you see, the threat may not be entirely made up, but it *is* entirely overblown. They have been using fear to manipulate people into surrendering their rights. The Patriot act was written well before 9/11/2001, they just waited for a convenient moment to push it through Congress. There's no way to describe this other than a complete power grab.