SJP says:

Love the accompanying picture! Isn’t that Uncle Christian about 5 rows back facing the camera? Howdy, Uncle Christian!

happyidiot says:

WOW. think of all the people this will employ. Once an industry starts it is hard to stop. See war on drugs for example.

michael sadler says:

#4 ECA – totally agree. Judging from the amount of rubbish that’s emailed between my contacts alone, they simply couldn’t handle the capacity, let alone extract any meaningful data.

Even if they could, there alternatives/counter-measures are so easy – post, forums, encrypted email, skype etc.

I’m tempted to say “let them try” because I’m sure they will fail (every other public sector computing initiative has had massive overruns, cost more than was originally thought and still not delivered) but it’s my tax pounds that will pay for this failure.

Jess Hurchist says:

If everyone inserts random words like ‘bomb’ ‘rob’ ‘destroy’ to show how pissed off we are with this sort of attack on our civil liberties it will overwhelm the already overwhelmed.
I really would rather die in a terrorist attack

Geoffrey says:

Major Wall Street banks already can and DO search all and I mean ALL request traffic to ALL their web sites. The already DO search for keywords in your querystrings in your HTTP requests to their properties both internal and public facing.

I know firsthand because I personally engineered one such comprehensive enterprise HTTP traffic analysis system which went live in 2006.

The key to finding needless among haystacks was and is to use distributed clustered computing power to search for text on multiprocessor servers working together as one unit. And regex. (Always regex!!)

Google is a or probably THE major industrial application which proves the power of distributed applications aka Cloud Computing to the rest of the public. Google shared their engineering ideas with the public in a big way but other companies have been doing similar things too.

Don’t be so fast to console yourself with the wishful thinking that “they can’t search your email for the sheer volume.”

Nonsense. Cluster computing has that solved in a big, big way.

re –

“FBI/CIA tried to capture TAGGED data with certain words in it…
They did 1 days scanning..
and filled a room 3 feet DEEP, 10×10.
WHICH would take 1-2 years of sorting and figuring WHAT AND WHO were responsible..
THEN tracking would be heinous just to find EACH person, IF’ they found something..
FREE service?? you couldnt have it…NO FREE Wifi unless you had FULL IDENTIFICATION.

Its stupid, hard, ignorant of the amount of DATA and storage required, LET alone the POWER/computers to do it…

Being able to SIT on a MEGAterebit connection and SORT data in REAL time…would be a tremendous task..”

DONE and DONE.

FBI and CIA are going to use the same techniques the Fortune 500 are using, if not now, then a little later.

All your base are belong to us. They already do.

gquaglia says:

Funny how many try and say the U.S. is becoming like George Orwell’s 1984. In truth, George had it right, but he was predicting the future of his homeland of England, not the U.S.

chuck says:

“…for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged.”

So they want a transcript of every phone call, plus e-mail. Plus, I assume any blog posting or comment, or anything else posted to the interwebitubes. In other words, a daily backup of the internet, kept in a database.

As a programmer, there are 2 ways I can respond to a client who makes ridiculous impossible demands:
1. Tell him he’s an idiot and lose the contract.
2. Agree with everything and keep working until the money’s all gone.

I wonder what will happen in this case.

Tim says:

Quoting Lou on May 20th, 2008 at 1:53 am

“What a crock of shit.
What’s wrong with the people in Britin.
Wake up !”

I Don’t think there is much wrong with us. Yes we have a few bad apples but on the whole we still have a fairly balanced society.

What people really need to realise is that this democracy thing we live in is little more than choosing one of three groups of politicians who all get advised by the same experts and civil servants.

I don’t mean to sound defeatist because the country is great (if a little expensive) and I wouldn’t want to live elsewhere.

The governments (whichever one you have) push through their own agenda (or that of the lobby groups) during the the first three quarters of their term in office. It is not until the last quarter that they worry about what the population want and then only because they want to be re-elected.

1. The UK Civil service has already lost tens of thousands of peoples confidential data this year.
2. Our national health service will (if they can get it working) be using one huge patient database accessible at each point of care.
3. We are the most CCTVed country in the world.
4.All the motorways now have cameras on bridges looking at each lane on motorways.
5. The London Underground uses Oyster cards that store a record of every journey you make.
6. If I break the window in my car then Autoglass know what my car is, who my insurer is and can authorise the repair themeslves even though I have never used them before.
7. When I visit a website my ISP and google log it.

Now Emails and phone calls? Come on give us a break. Why don’t we just use cc the government in on all our communications.

Democracy is good! It could get better though!

Emma says:

Yeh I still can’t believe. It’s absurd. From now on ill always use 0800 numbers