OSINFO - Open Sources Information

From: http://mashable.com/

Posted: 16 Oct 2008 04:47 AM PDT

The Communications Data Bill, suggested by UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, proposes that all UK residents’ mobile and Web communication should be stored by the ISPs and MSPs in a giant database for 12 months. Actual content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of e-mails and calls. However, storing information on visited websites is also mentioned, and if that’s not an invasion of privacy, I don’t know what is.

Smith explains the proposal thus: “Our ability to intercept communications and obtain communications data is vital to fighting terrorism and combating serious crime, including child sex abuse, murder and drugs trafficking. Communications data - that is, data about calls, such as the location and identity of the caller, not the content of the calls themselves - is used as important evidence in 95% of serious crime cases and in almost all security service operations since 2004.

But the communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we intercept communications and collect communications data needs to change too.”

An oft (accidentally or on purpose) neglected fact is that the communications revolution also lets you monitor people’s activity in a way that wasn’t at all possible before. Now, in addition to being able to tap your phone calls, the UK government has an additional wealth of information that can — true — sometimes be used to thwart crime, but it can also be used to extract every last detail on people’s personal and private affairs, criminals and non-criminals alike.