Plans to record all emails and phone calls

Plans to record all emails and phone calls
More power to Big Brother. The Home Office will create a database to store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year under plans currently under discussion, it has emerged. The Government wants to create the system to fight terrorism and crime. The police and security services believe it will make it easier to access important data as communications become more complex. Telecoms firms and internet service providers (ISPs) have already been approached by the Home Office, which would be given customer records if the plans were realised. The security services and police would then be able to access records for any individual over the previous 12 months by gaining permission through the courts. http://tinyurl.com/5ssqcl

This government make me wonder what generations of soldiers have fought and died for. In the past ten years this government has dismantled almost everything which made this country great. We have lost most of our freedoms. Soon we will have lost them all. I believe it's time to seriously plan a life elsewhere - before they close the borders and restrict our movements.

Re: Plans to record all emails and phone calls
More power to Big Brother. The Home Office will create a database to store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year under plans currently under discussion, it has emerged. Well, some folks will be happy - those who forget to back up their important e-mails! :)

thought they already did this anyway so ive got nowt to worry about then :x

Answer for those concerned: Unregistered PayG phones. Soon to be banned I expect.

This is a mad idea. Apart from the Government not being able to store such a vast amount of information, it wouldn't be accurate. What about people who use internet cafes? What's the point of storing the details of a web page that is visited if the web page chagnes every day - or hour even? What about intranets? If they can't set up the NHS system without massive overruns - there's no chance they can process & store this amount of information - even if it was accurate. An attempt at this would cost billions and be a fruitless exercise. So, they claim that they need to fight crime/terrorism. It'd be like searching for one needle in every haystack in the world. I think the article in the link below explains what a mad idea it is. http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2217073/government-plans-database-phone

This is a mad idea. Indeed, from a psychopathic government. The worrying thing though, is while this is probably not achievable at the moment, given the rate that computer technology evolves and improves, this (and worse) may very well be easily possible in a few years time. Brave New World?

Big Brother is watching you... ...but luckily he's overstretched and has underestimated the job of keeping track of us all The Government is planning to introduce a giant database that will hold the details of every phone call we have made, every e-mail we have sent and every webpage we have visited in the past 12 months. This is needed to fight crime and terrorism, the Government claims. The Orwellian nature of this proposal cannot be overstated. However, there is one saving grace for people who fear for their civil liberties. The probability of the project ever seeing the light of day is close to zero. This proposal - like so many grandiose government IT schemes before it - is technologically unfeasible. The current levels of traffic on the internet alone (including e-mail) would require storage volumes of astronomical proportions - and internet use by the public is still growing rapidly. Meanwhile, the necessary processing capabilities to handle such a relentless torrent of information do not bear thinking about. Modern computer processors are fast, but writing data to disks will always be a serious bottleneck. Take a quick sample from the London Internet Exchange, the UK's hub and one of world's largest points at which each ISP exchanges traffic. Yearly LINX carries at the very least 365 petabytes of data - that is the equivalent of the contents of about 26 million iPod Nanos that have the capacity to hold nearly 2,000 songs each. There is no commercial technology that is capable of writing at those kinds of speeds. It's not just writing that would be problematic, but the reading of the data too. It would be immensely difficult to pinpoint in such a massive database an e-mail sent by a particular person at a particular time. It's all too familiar in large-scale government projects that the technological expectations of civil servants gallop far ahead of reality. The Ministry of Defence's requirements for the Nimrod radar project was a classic example of overspecification. The result was a system that was unable to process data because the technology Whitehall assumed would exist in the future, when the planes would finally take to the skies, simply never materialised. The planes, after hundreds of millions were spent, had to revert to the traditional Awacs system instead. The men who gave us the new NHS database, likewise, severely underestimated operational realities. The good news is that we will not be robbed of our privacy by this la-*test*-('") database because it will remain just a pipedream. We taxpayers will, however, be robbed of billions of pounds as the IT consultancies draw up their bids to design and deliver the undeliverable. Phil Hendren is a Unix systems administrator. He blogs at dizzythinks.net http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3979928.ece

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