Slashdot Mirror
UK Plans More Spying On Internet Users Under 'Terrorism' Pretext
Wowsers writes "In vogue with other countries cracking down on freedom and democracy on the internet as discussed in Slashdot recently, the UK is joining in with plans to track all phone calls, text messages, email traffic and websites visited online, all to be stored in vast databases under new government anti-terror plans. As reported in The Telegraph, security services will have access to information about who has been communicating with each other on social networking sites such as Facebook, direct messages between subscribers on Twitter would also be stored, as well as communications between players in online video games. The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the ex-Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information. The idea was later dropped in favor of requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers' expense."
The story could be summarized, roughly, as so: Bureaucrats continue a new iteration of an old legacy in developing a further exaggerated sense of state control, in response to a perceived sense of national threat - this time, endeavoring to revoke some of the citizen's newer liberties, in endeavoring to develop (and substitute, therewith) a notion of "State-owned personal privacy" (TM)
(DNRTA)
I'd like to believe that the pragmatic arguments against it will be enough. I'm not familiar with the UK's own governmental charters, so I cannot argue more to the principles of the matter. I'm sure that the Open Rights Group might be able to chime in on the matter, though. Cheers to them.
If fighting terrorism involves violating people's rights I suspect we're going to breed a lot more terrorists.
It sure will cost a lot, but think of it as a good investment for when peop*** terrorists take to the street like in Greece.