Posted on 10/05/2008 6:29:55 PM PDT by Dawnsblood
Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.
GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.
Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.
Ministers are braced for a backlash similar to the one caused by their ID cards programme. Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “Any suggestion of the government using existing powers to intercept communications data without public discussion is going to sound extremely sinister.”
Further details of the new plan will be unveiled next month in the Queen’s speech.
The Home Office stressed no formal decision had been taken but sources said officials had made clear that ministers had agreed “in principle” to the programme.
Officials claim live monitoring is necessary to fight terrorism and crime. However, critics question whether such a vast system can be kept secure. A total of 57 billion text messages were sent in the UK last year - 1,800 every second.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
England is now in Airstrip One .
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but EVERY major government already has the capability to spy on every email and phone call. My late father’s only job in Miami at Southern Bell in the 1960’s was to tap phones for the government on the frame. It’s much easier now.
They’ll look at emails but won’t name the Religion practiced by terrorists? Fascinating.
Can you say HORSE Crap..
The English countryside has experienced increasing home invasions because there are basically no police on duty or available to respond to emergency calls. Lack of money.
But they have all these billions to monitor emails to solve crime?
Take a good look America. This is your future with an Obama Presidency.
I want to email the UK and add the F and C
If the UK was conquered by the old USSR it would be an improvement.
Except for the Muslims in their midst. Their 'outrage', 'anger', and 'offendedness' will have the tough British police force backing down in a hot second.
But Britain figures it needs 12 billion pounds to ramp up their infrastructure to capture all transmissions. I wonder how much the US would need? (Not that I want them to).
And yet they had the resources to prosecute old folks who pushed back at "Yobs" caught vandalizing property.
They've also prosecuted verbal "Hate Crimes" against Muslims.
Good to see the Brits have their priorities straight. /S
True, but unlike many, we still have due process under the Constitution. Whether or not that means anything anymore is arguable.
There are no citizens in the UK, only subjects.
Being modern day England, I suppose the mosques of the UK will be exempted from such investigations.
Oh, like this doesn’t happen in the good old US of A!
Get real.
This is how the noose tightens. Every limit on freedom is justified as being neccesary for “national security”. The assault has already started big time - 9/11 gives them all the justification they need, and the public support to do it as well.
The main difference between the US and the UK is that Americans still cling to this idea that they are citizens.
This is a plan that Obama is sure to endorse “for the good of all citizens of the world”
There's no way to definitively determine the extent of government surveillance, because the snooper asserts state secret. Mind you, snooping with a reason, that is, having suspicion, is a part of "hidden" due process. "Hidden" because the only incidents seen by the public are those that are litigated.
As a check on snooping without suspicion, the fourth amendment provides that an "impartial" third party, a member of the judicial branch, review requests for snooping - before or after the snoop, depending on circumstances. But Congress has carved out an international call exception to that rule (FISA says any international call can be snooped without involving the judiciary).
The question of how government monitoring on a mass scale associates with "government of a free people" is litigated in Europe in much the same way it is in the US. See Liberty v. UK: European Court of Human Rights finds mass surveillance system violates the right to privacy, as an example of a news story about the Court case, "Liberty v. The United Kingdom." In order to surmount the objection elucidated by the Court, in that case, the Euro-snoopers are seeking legislative modification - exactly the same pattern followed in the US. That is, some left-wing nutbag civil liberty group sues the government (ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US; UK human rights organization Liberty, Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and British-Irish Rights Watch in the UK), and if the Courts got too close to the executive's snooping activity, the executive goes to the legislature to get the law changed.
More links relating to Liberty v. United Kingdom below:
UK government fined for violation of right to privacy
UK phonetap laws breach privacy (The Guardian)
Call for reform of Irish/UK surveillance laws
The case itself is a fascinating read (http://www.centrumforrattvisa.se/images/File/FRA/LibertyvUK.pdf), as it describes the same sort of division (or legal distinction) between data interception/storage vs. data analysis that plays in the US. The law is unsettled in the US, meaning cases haven't been litigated to conclusion, and the operative condition is that breach occurs when the stored information is called up by a human. Mass interception and storage has NOT been litigated to conclusion in the US.
He supported the equivalent in the US, by voting AYE to pass the FISA Modernization Act of 2008.
The issue of communications privacy is an area where the two major political parties are quite close to each other, in practice. I don't see communications privacy as a useful issue in drawing a distinction, and pushing voters toward one party/candidate or the other.
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