Nanny Knows Best

Nanny Knows Best
Dedicated to exposing, and resisting, the all pervasive nanny state that is corroding the way of life and the freedom of the people of Britain.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Villain of The Year

Villain of The YearI 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!

6 comments:

  1. I share your concerns on the amount of legislation that is being considered/brought to fruition that enables information to be gathered on individuals in the UK.

    I too have commented on these issues on my blog in an article entitled 'Welcome to Big Brother UK' What adds to my concerns is the fact that government agencies are considering selling some information about it's citizens to business for profit.

    Good luck to the guy only known as Lord Buckingham. He has really pissed off the authorities. With all their resources they have been unable to find out his real identity and he refuses to tell them. Another taking a stand against the Nanny State.

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  2. Anonymous10:38 AM

    Recipe for worthless data retention:

    Nanny demands that all of the chats, web traffic, and e-mail be retained for perusal, even unto the breaking of the world. In this manner they will protect us from 'the terrorists', who of course ALWAYS oblige by using e-mail and Instant Messaging without encryption. Ah well... there are plenty of evil-doers of evil that they will catch with this; young Nigel, caught talking about smoking a joint on IM, is more likely to obey a Fixed Penalty Notice than Osama Bin Laden. Nice money spinner!

    What they'll actually get is the random browsing traffic of a couple of hundred angry geeks, who've written a few simple scripts to randomly trawl the Internet for nothing in particular whenever the computer is idle, filling up ISP retention systems with crap. Disks and tapes are cheap - but not that cheap.

    No doubt such scripts will soon after be the subject of yet another unenforceable law, making life still more difficult for real people.

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  3. Did anyone watch "Dispatches: Stealing your Freedom" last night on Channel 4? If not, I believe it will be repeated on More4 next Saturday evening.

    It was appalling to hear Falconer speaking the way he did - he just cannot see any wrong in collecting arbitrary DNA and all sorts of other information about us, storing this on a Government database and then using our private information to solve a crime which may happen "one day".

    Falconer said it all really, and confirmed to me that these clowns in Parliament just view us all as potential criminals and terrorists!!!

    I am now utterly convinced that much of Blair's so called 'war on terror' are just lies, deception and spin which started with a criminal atrocity on September 11th 2001 by Bush's administration!!!

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  4. I saw it.

    It was very good, and confirmed what we have all suspected that Blair and his cronies do not give a stuff about "due process".

    It seems that more power is being given to officious people who believe that it is their role to police what we think and say.

    Blair is determined to destory "due process", if he is not removed from office soon he may well achieve that.

    Ken

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  5. Anonymous7:10 PM

    If you havent seen this yet:

    "NSA Uses Private Firms for Massive Unchecked Domestic Surveillance"

    http://prisonplanet.com/articles/february2006/280206NSA.htm

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  6. Anonymous9:44 PM

    It might be a dumb rule, there will be an astonishing amount of information, stored among all the companies leading to a needle in a haystack situation, the cost of all this storage will be large and paid by us, arrrrgggghhhh

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