Nanny drags Britain ever further down the road of total surveillance.
Nanny's Home Orifice has announced that information about all landline and mobile phone calls, made in the UK, must now be logged and stored for a year under new laws. The data collected about calls made and received will be available to a staggering 652 public bodies, including the police and councils.
However, please do not be alarmed, Nanny has promised that the content of calls and texts would not be read.
So that's alright then!
Minister for Security and Counter-terrorism Tony McNulty attempted to turn the new rules into a nice way of helping old ladies fix their gas cookers.
Quote:
"Say some old lady has got difficulties
with someone who's repaired the gas in
her house and has a mobile phone
for somebody who's clearly dodgy.
The local authorities can just get the
subscriber information next to that number.
The second level of data is not simply
the subscriber, but also the calls made by that phone.
And the third level which is purely
for the security forces, police, etc,
is not just the subscriber information
and the calls made, but also the calls
coming in and location data -
where the calls are made from."
McNulty claims that local councils would only have access to data on "a legitimate and proportional basis".
Who the hell trusts local councils with any task, let alone one that gives them snooping rights?
The Home Orifice also promised that local councils will not use the data as a means to collect taxes....errrrmm, anyone believe that?
Remember though that this little exrcise is also being promoted as (yet another) anti-terrorist measure.
ReplyDeleteHow this is going to stop terrorism nobody has actually bothered to spell out, but we can be assured that our masters have the country's best interests at heart.
We should all be grateful that there are now - it seems - some 652 organisations protecting us against terrorism. doesn't that make you feel secure?
Unless the dodgy tradesman bought a pay as you go phone with cash, no chance of tracing it
ReplyDelete"some 652 organisations protecting us against terrorism. doesn't that make you feel secure?"
ReplyDeleteYep. Glad I'm not a Brazilian though. With 652 organisations now involved, will there be any foreign visitors left alive?
How can "laws" like this get passed through Parliament without some sort of PUBLIC debate? So just because some twit thought this should be a good idea, we are now all reduced to being potential terrorists!
ReplyDeleteEven assuming the risk of terrorism DID justify such surveillence by police, MI5 or whatever, what right do the tea-swilling, pin-striped, seat-polishing parasites in Town Halls up and down the country have to take part in it? Is this a further example of how councils regard the community to be their own corporate assets? I wasn't aware that local authorities have any powers regarding terrorism nor other serious crime. Perhaps it's to come down hard on Housing Benefit claimants (when councils actually get around to paying it) diddling a fiver too much money. Money much better spent on councillors' and officers' "fact finding" expeditions to warmer climes that always seem to become necessary during our winter.
ReplyDeletePete
>>How can "laws" like this get passed through Parliament without some sort of PUBLIC debate?
ReplyDeleteDebate? Parliament? That's not the NuLabour way. The preferred way is to use a statutory instrument where a minister simply signs a new law into being without any of that tedious voting business. The last 10 years has seen an explosion in the number of laws and regulations created this way.
Last year they even tried to pass the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 that in it's original form would have granted themselves broad powers that would effectively have made it possible to bypass Parliament for anything.
Thanks anonymous.
ReplyDeleteWorth a wikipedia search on Menwith Hill...me thinks
"This was put through parliament in a written statement, thus not allowing for debate, and generating some controversy[3]"
Interestingly, one of the 652 organisations that will have access to all this information will be the Charities Commission.
ReplyDelete(I'm still trying to work that one out).
"Common Purpose" is a registered charity Grumpy..
ReplyDeleteDoes this happen "listed" ?
Inject a Norton anti-corruption scan
throughout the entire system immediately
grumpy,
ReplyDeleteWhat many people have not yet noticed is that the organisations previously known as 'Charities' now seem to be run as pseudo NGOs (actually most are more like official government organisations) by people appointed by ministers as quangos appointed by ministers to appoint people to run NGOs.
There are quite a few nice little scams going on in that world I reckon all based on tax free commercial activities. But the main thing is that certain busybodies can gain a lot of power and influence (Think of Greenpeace or WWF for starters) without having to prove their worth or face elections or have any public responsibility.
When you see organisations like The Womens Institute shacking up with a 'charity' like Transport 2000 - an overtly political pressure group drawn from Labour membership mostly and acting as a front to obtain further subsidies for the Train and Coach industries - you just know that there is something odious afoot.
Thus the inclusion of the Charity Commission in the list of 652 organisations seems less unusual.
Taking this a stage further, how many people will be working for the 652 organisations? Some of the orgs are quite large ... maybe 5% of the population will be working for organisations that have access to all this personal information? So 1 on 20 people, or maybe more, will have a fairly direct route to asking for information held about others.
If my guesstimate is even vaguely close is that not a similar number so the suggest figures for the Nazis before WW2 and the Stasi post WW2 in Germany?
Earlier generations could have saved a lot of aggro by inviting Adolf in, had they known how tings would pan out.
According to The Mail on Sunday:
ReplyDelete795 agencies can see your records without saying why
Everybody everywhere use all your phones as much as you can.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the swine will just *burst*?