Is this really going to happen in the U.K., every e-mail, phone call, and website visited to be recorded?
Every email, phone call and website visit is to be recorded and stored after the Coalition Government revived controversial Big Brother snooping plans.. according to an article I read in the Daily Telegraph.
I am an American and this seems like the ultimate invasion of privacy to me. I am wondering if this might become law in England and what the people of the U.K. think about this?
Michael B2010-10-20T06:52:36Z
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It has in fact already, in effect, happened - and not only in the UK. Phone calls, texts and emails are currently computer-processed. This means that they sit on someone's hard drive until they are overwritten - and that can be months, even years. The sweet nothings you texted to your neighbour's wife, the phoned boast of speeding round the M25, the email showing you in your boxers drinking gin on the beach - they can all be retrieved by any computer-literate person with access to the machine.
In very many countries (including all of the EU and the USA) the police already have the right, on suspicion of a crime, to get a search warrant and access any computer data they think they need. If in the process they turn up the sweet nothings, the boast, the drunken frolic - well, goodbye privacy.
It has already happened. If you want the net, the mobile phone and all the instant modern lifestyle, that is the price you have to pay.
The only controversial thing about this is the idea of making it the responsibility of internet providers to do the storage. All your online activities are already monitored, as are your telephone calls. That is at the heart of 'Echelon' type systems. The main 'spine' of the internet system in the UK runs right through Cheltenham, home of GCHQ (the British end of the NSA-GCHQ combined organisation).
You might like to consider how many countries are already monitoring your activity. The UK-US are not the only people to have an Echelon system, it is reasonable to suppose that the Russians, Chinese etc. are doing the same thing. In addition, nothing you ever do online can ever be guaranteed to go away. The number of systems both private and commercial which automatically archive information makes that certain.
Think about the amount of data that would be to store, i do not think the technology is there. There are phone calls made every second of the day, it would be literally impossible to record every phone call that everyone is making in a entire country. Same thing with the internet, there is no possible way they could keep track of EVERY website everyone visits. Its just not possible. Regardless, even if they had some super-computers that could store all of this data, imagine how many people it would take to sit there and inspect it all and listen to all of those phone calls?
Since 9/11 the US has spent billions on setting up centres to help fight terrorism analysing information etc how do you know it is not happening already in the States.?You can bet that if a car bomb or suicide bomber is succesfull in the States up will go the CCTV cameras in every major city!
Andrew S Calm before the storm2010-10-20T13:40:58Z
Yes and it's probably far worse than we realize. The programmers who work for the government have supercomputers to work with and can write algorithms that bring the information together in ways that we haven't even dreamed of yet including pre-crime profiling.
The government's language translation ability is probably a lot better than anything we have seen because it can use supercomputers.