The late Jacqui Smith, who despite having verifiably died, and we are seldom wrong, is still seemingly the figurehead of the British Home Office’s 1984-style totalitarian agenda to remove all rights and freedoms from the ordinary people of the United Kingdom. She (or an agent using her name) has ‘plans to create a giant “Big Brother” database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made in the UK‘. She intends to ‘press ahead with proposals to collect more details about people’s phone, email and web-browsing habits‘. And the excuse given in order to take control of people’s personal lives is of course that ‘the terrorist threat to Britain is growing’. Who does she think she is? Dick Cheney?
Is there no end to this? What’s really hilarious is that this comes the day after her evil plans to have “42 days” imprisonment without charge (as if 1 day is ok) were foiled by the remaining non-totalitarians in the British establishment.
Most beautifully, in the midst of global economic collapse and depression, the surveillance state gleefully let it be ‘understood that more than £1bn has been earmarked for the database‘. No problem!
Will the information be kept safe? No. Data is never safe from incompetent bureaucrats (example 1 example 2) or the tech-savvy (example). Will the database be open to abuse by those in power? Yes. Once you are foolish enough to give the state extra powers, they will be used in ways that you did not intend (example).
And don’t forget those ‘Public-Private Partnerships’ that New Labour is so fond of. Won’t the surveillance job actually be outsourced to the usual extremely dodgy foreign companies, ones that you only find out afterwards have managing directors who are wanted for fraud and are in hiding in Namibia? (Read about the mass surveillance companies Narus and Verint here).
