Private firm may track all email and calls | UK news | The Guardian — It’s amazing how much the British public will tolerate. Let’s see what happens when this gets into the wrong hands.
The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone’s calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.A cabinet decision to put the management of the multibillion pound database of all UK communications traffic into private hands would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses.
But in his strongest criticism yet of the superdatabase, Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, who has firsthand experience of working with intelligence and law enforcement agencies, told the Guardian such assurances would prove worthless in the long run and warned it would prove a “hellhouse” of personal private information.
Found by Joe Carlson.
“Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” – Benito Mussolini
Those who ignore the lessons of History …
Sounds like something out of East Berlin. Something Stasi would’ve wanted, had they had the technology.
“…keep track of everyone’s calls, emails, texts and internet use…”
Is there to be no privacy at all? Does this mean the Royal Mail is keeping track of who we write to? And, of course, having all this data in private hands is a completely secure idea. I’m sure there will be no laptops or USB memory sticks going home at night.
A disaster in the making. Much like the UK itself…
The USA analog is Blackwater and their kind.
This kind of thing happened before in the USA in the 20th century.
Government workers who thought they were clever, thought they got around the constitutional constraints on the behavior of government by assigning the dirty work against Americans to be done by private corporations rather than government.
Of course the Constitution still applies to government AND THEIR ASSIGNS so the subversive elements creeping around in our government are out of luck.
We thought that George Orwell’s book “1984” was a warning.
We were wrong, it is a how-to book for the government.
And Hitler PRoved it worked..as well as what was happening in Russia.
Orwell just wrote it up.
The British government is famous for two things. Running a police state and failing to keep confidential information safe.
As an Englishman I am not worried about a police state. In my opinion our government is too incompetent to keep effective control of anything.
It’s when all this data is found on a usb stick in a bar or when they decide to send a DVD through the post.
I’m always amazed by how gullable JCD is! The first thing you need to know is that MOST things you read in the UK tabloid press is made up!
This will never happen… feel free to come back and taunt me if I’m ever proven wrong.
Now be a good man and go make up some rubbish about the US for a change!
Here in the UK most people don’t want this, although please don’t view our government as any more secure: it’s the fact that this data is stored, not that it is being run by a private entitiy that is the problem. Either way, this data will be “lost” sometime or other.
NSA, since I got out in 1973, has always been outsourcing it’s work to private company’s. Nothing new in this Police State!
In Ubuntu, the text on this blog is not very readable.
this is funny, if you think about how the gouvernement take care of the the citizin’s privat data. they lose them so often, why don’t they make them directly accesible to the public. and now private companys should do such a job.
It’s like hitler won WW 2.
That place is going down the tubes !
Hope we don’t follow.