The United Kingdom seems on track to turn their residents into natural-born suspects. There is a draft bill underway in that country that would give law enforcement the right and the tools to track every email, record every phone call, and log anything and everything that people do on the net for a year, including such things as tweets and Skype calls.
Home Office Secretary Theresa May said in an editorial published ahead of the bill’s unveiling that only evil-doers should be frightened.
“Our proposals are sensible and limited,” she wrote in The Sun, the country’s top-selling daily. “They will give the police and some other agencies access to data about online communications to tackle crime, exactly as they do now with mobile phone calls and texts. Unless you are a criminal, then you’ve nothing to worry about from this new law.”
And of course all this law aims to do, is to go after criminals, pedophiles and terrorists, and if you so much as question the need to stockpile such ridiculous amounts of personal information on your citizens without any probable cause at all, then politicians are quick to call you a conspiracy theorist. It just does not follow from recording Joe Blow in Liverpool’s Skype calls that England is a safer country. That’s just the same stupid and unneccessary security theater that is already being played out at airports around the world, inconveniencing millions of people to, as we are told again and again, catch those evil terrorists.
The scale of this proposed breach of privacy, turning a whole country into potential suspects, is just breathtaking.
Posted in Equality/Rights, Internet, IT
Tagged Britain, draft bill, email, internet, law, police, privacy, record, Theresa May, track, UK
