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UK Gov't Creating Secret Mega Database On Citizens Without Informing Parliament (theregister.co.uk)
Alexander J Martin, reporting for The Register: The Home Office is secretly creating a centralised database on the good folk of Britain without presenting the capability increases to the public or subjecting them to Parliamentary scrutiny. The Register can reveal the project, which was described as simply a "replatforming" of the department's aging IT infrastructure, has already begun to roll out, with the "first wave" of changes being delivered in what it is calling the Technology Platforms for Tomorrow (TPT) programme. TPT will lay the foundations for this mega database by ushering in "core infrastructure, compute platforms and Live Service capability" changes, primarily using Hadoop, the open source software framework for centralising databases and allowing batch queries and analyses to be run across them in bulk.
Speaking as a representative from the Home Office, I can assure you as citizenry there is nothing to be alarmed about. We've compiled this database to detect certain abberant behavior in britons that may indicate nefarious intent similar to a terrorist. Among these behaviors:
1. Milk applied before the tea, such as to scald it
2. too much milk in the tea, such as to coddle the weak gullet of a terrorist.
3. Milk and lemon in the tea, a sure sign of a deviant madman hellbent on the destruction of our great nation
4. Enjoying, or not, marmite. we havent decided ourselves (janice in signals detection says it works on pizza too?)
5. Questioning, mentioning, or affording any opinion on the Faulkand Islands. You know who you are violet ortiz born 6/3/1970 and wed to mister lonnie harvey of 2592 dane st who also happens to have a half eaten bottle of vegemite from holiday last year in Perth. We keep those sheep very well fed thank you kindly now back to your Reddit and dont leave that crisp wrapper on the train like last time, you caused an awful lot of anxiety for that polish maid sitting behind you.
Good people go to bed earlier.
WTF UKGOV?!!!
YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO SPY ON YOUR CITIZENS!
The way it is SUPPOSED to work is that all five eyes countries spy on each others' citizens, then share their data with each other.
So this should be America spying on UK citizens.
Or Australia.
Or New Zealand.
Or sorry, Canada.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There's no such thing as a British citizen. The correct term is SUBJECT.
Nonsense.
I'm a British citizen, not a subject.
If you don't believe me, take a look at my passport and see what it says there.
The story would have been a lot more interesting.