Phone calls database considered

Phone calls database considered

news.bbc.co.uk

Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged.

The plans, reported in the Times, are at an early stage and may be included in the draft Communications Bill later this year, the Home Office confirmed.

(visit the link for the full news article)

I wonder what our members from the U.K. think about this measure. At least is not like here in the U.S. that we are informed when some secret program is expose by the media.

Seems a bit excessive in my opinion though to create a database of every single phone call or email, may be they shooting high so at least they come up with something.

news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by Bunch


chances are if there being open about it then the intel agencys have been doing some version of this plan for a long while now maybe not in quite the scope of this one. but you can bet there already recording fonecalls and emails probly ims and text messages as well. id doubt the us is the only contry with a version of the echelon system.

Call me paranoid, but I was under the impression that this was already going on?!?

There has been talk for a long time about electronic media and phone lines having ‘watchers’ for flagged words and topics. It would only have been a short step to recording them.

Like Krill said. If its being announced now it is probably already happening.

Government rule number 1: When the infrastructure is in place or the policy has already been carried out for X number of years, announce to the public that you consider doing it in the future.

That's exactly what this is.

Sounds like they're copying America. The question is why? Why would they want to copy us? What is the American government getting out of this deal that the UK wants to get in on?

This is scary. Not only from a privacy point of view, since I must admit I sometimes let go sentences like "someone should take care of that and this..". While this being just angerfilled ranting it could easily be turned against me eh?

From the democratic point of view it's even worse. It's people's given right to be left alone and keep secrets about themselves and the personal life as long as it doesn't hurt the general public. But knowing your political preferences at any given time. Elections could be won before they were even announced.
Besides, who'd be watching the watchers? There's bound to be individuals who'll be benefiting more from a step like this, in government terms.
A record like this would blindly strip people of the idea of democracy.

Could these kind of laws that are being implemented these last minutes before the show starts be a precurser to what laws they want under a united Europe?

How much more can pride of the free man take before we are willing to litterally fight back against the facist democrats we apparently elected into office?

[edit on 20/5/08 by flice]

I moved My original post as per suggestion of JAK to here. Instead of "reposting" it though I'm going to just quote it here.

reply to post by JAK

 

If you really think this is news, you're behind on the times JAK. Sorry to spoil it for you. I've been reading on every single kind of possible source of intelligence gathering arena you can think of to understand all of this. Here's a great book that will delve you a whole lot more into the length of the Government's snooping into everything you do.

No Place to Hide

This book details every agency, every private industry company, and names Law Enforcement as well as Government Agency specifics and all of the entire process along with all kinds of other things you can imagine to add to your knowledge of "Big Brother" and the no-no's they're up to.

[edit on 20-5-2008 by SpartanKingLeonidas]

This may be something the governments have already been doing for some time, but to come out and make a law that allows governments to search for "terrorism" (or other keywords) in every email, text message, in-fact every electronic communications, identify whodunnit and arrest that whoever under the Terrorism Act with no evidence and no bl**dy phone call for ninety days!...

How many more laws are being rewritten as we speak to include clauses to allow any search to be used as evidence in court.
Finally, to end in a conspiracy theory.

A national database that listens for the word "kill", triggers a GPS locator for the mobile phone in use. While police helicopters are scrambled, a search is made to identify who sent it...

I obviously think that the technology to put this to work is in use in many places, speciallly in the private sector and some government agencies but only to monitor their own employees.

I think it would be a little hard to believe that they would have this already in place and performing it without at least some kind of law that would legitimaze it though, that would just be political suicide IMO.

This will help defeat terrorism? lol haha what a joke, that is obviously an excuse.

All of this extra security and new laws because of terrorism is really silly and odd. They are obviously using terrorism as an excuse to do these things.

Because a terrorist can simply bomb ANYWHERE, they can walk onto any train, bus, cafe, resturant, parties, etc etc without problems. But yet we don't see it happen here? Why all this security, when the terrorists can easily do something anywhere!

This won't stop terrorism, so why are they really doing it?

[edit on 21-5-2008 by _Phoenix_]

it probably won't go through, but there you go. any measures by the uk gov. to counter terrorism seem suspicious to me, given the fact that they haven't used them for the last 40 odd years when there was an actual terrorist threat to england as opposed to this phoney scare monger threat they bleet on about now.