All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.
Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.
They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.
Screw Making it public. It’ll be a perfect stalking tool. Not to mention all the pervs using it to watch schools.
Government sponsored insider trading! YAYYYY!
Want to know how a second american revolution would work out?
http://xkcd.com/652/
Bout like that. Have fun with your shotgun!
Did anyone else click through to the article and read it?
The article says it hasn’t been brought before Parliament yet.
As #6 notes, (from the article) “Meanwhile the communications providers themselves questioned the cost of the scheme and whether it was even technically feasible.”
And while Jacqui Smith et. al. say they will push the legislation through, it seems there is more than insignificant opposition.
“more than insignificant opposition.”
reword??
more then significant opposition.
21,
Thats the BEST PART..
you can TRACK BACK who is watching, and KNOW who the pervs are, and WHO is stalking you.
@me,
Yes it’s the local city council!
There was a law introduced a few years ago ‘RIPA’ to allow the authorities to get this type of information.
It was vitally needed to fight terrorism, not the normal IRA bombing kind of terrorism we have managed to live with for 30years – but modern scary cyber terrorism.
It was then immediately used by the local council to track people pretending to live at a different address to get their kids into a better school, people putting their trash out on the wrong day and terrorist dog walkers in the park
Time to put out a program that causes all computers to incessantly google “Bomb Making Techniques,” “Her Majesty Naked,” “John Dvorak’s Sex Crimes Against Parliament” and so on.
You know. Just to give them something to do.
More false positives than there are stars in the sky, I’m betting. And the amount of electricity used in this sort of thing, all the quickly obsolete equipment for deep packet inspection and the servers themselves dealing with every packet at least three times instead of just once, and the raw tonnage of hard disks needed to store this pointless crap on. It would probably be more environmentally friendly ( And cost less in terms of hardware.) to just give everyone a fucking Hummer H2. We need the Green Party people to oppose this as an extensive waste of energy. And maybe some propaganda with inflated figures about the amount of CO2 this is gonna put into the environment. And how the politicos who are for this are going to raise prices for telephone and internet on the consumer to pay for this ineffective crap.
This kind of surveillance will be used for 1% good and 99% evil.