Villain of The Year

I am more than amused to learn that Nanny, and her lackeys in the government, have been named "Villain of the Year" by a group of the world's largest internet companies.

Marvellous!

We of course knew that ages ago!

Anyhoo, the Internet Service Providers Association held an awards ceremony in London last week; in which they said that the Nanny had used its presidency of the European Union in 2005 to push through EU-wide data retention laws, that will force ISPs and telecoms companies "to retain more data for longer without proper impact assessment".

The association's members, which include; BT as well as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are already among the biggest repositories of personal data in the world.

Under Nanny's legislation, which was given final approval in Brussels last week, they will have keep details of their European customers' telephone calls and internet use for up to two years.

Previously ISPs in Britain had operated under a voluntary code included in the 2001 Anti-terrorism, Crime & Security Act. The code recommended that subscriber information be stored for 12 months and web activity information, which includes logs of web pages visited, for just four days.

Nanny has argued that such information is a crucial weapon in the fight against terrorism. Its support for the new EU measures followed the London bombings in July.

By the way folks, in case you haven't realised it, unlike a "normal" war where there is eventuality a victory of loss; the "war against terrorism" will never be "won" or "lost", it will simply go on and on and on.

This gives Nanny the "right", in her sad twisted little world, to keep us all under surveillance for the rest of our lives.

An ISPA spokesman hit the nail on the head, and said:

"There are strong concerns that these data retention measures would be used for wider purposes than just terrorism.

There is lot of confusion here, on issues such as data protection and human rights.

It is not simply a matter of costs."

The body has suggested that data could potentially be made available to groups other than the security forces, in moves that could breach people's privacy.

Look what happened with Google, which is arguing with the White House over attempts to have it hand over search data to the authorities.

This surveillance will not come cheaply either, one estimate is that it will cost a large company £26M to set up the system and £9M a year in administration costs.

Nanny truly is a villain, an award richly deserved methinks!