UK Government embraces database plans – the people are revolting
By Dave Parrack
Plans for a super-database in the UK, containing information of every phone call, text and email first came to light in July of this year. This database would allow police, security services, and the Government itself to have access to all our forms of communication.
The proposals were then detailed more fully at the beginning of this month, with the eavesdropping program costing around £12 billion and allowing GCHQ to keep tabs on us all. There was also a reason given for this database: the war on terrorism. Like we haven’t heard that one before.
And now the British Government has further tried to justify the plans, with PC Pro reporting Home Secretary Jacqui Smith as saying:
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.
That may well be the case, but those of us who aren’t terrorists and murderers don’t want to see our rights to privacy eroded again and again until we come to a 1984-like state. Labeling every new measure as a means of combating terrorism may be clever but the British public and the MPs who serve them aren’t going to sit by and watch Big Brother become a reality.
The Independent newspaper suggests that parliament may actually fight back against the Government proposals. The Liberal democrats are completely against these Orwellian plans, and Labour and Conservative backbenchers aren’t too keen on them either.
A consultation on the plans will now take place, but these things tend to be always biased and end up backing the Government. It may be 2008, meaning George Orwell was 24 years out on his prediction, but life is becoming increasingly less free in the UK. And this super-database will surely be another nail in the coffin of privacy.
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