Big Brother Surveillance idea revived in Britain

It appears as part of the strategic review that the Coalition government is going to revive the plans to monitor all email, phone and website traffic and store said data for up to a year, for "security purposes".

Effectively allowing the police and security services the ability to spy on all electronic communication in Britain. The question has yet to be raised under what circumstances the forces will be allowed to access the data. Whether freely or if they require a court order, but it raises some very worrying prospects for the future.

Reading through it looks as though the data will be stored by the service provides and will only include the contact details, but not the actual conversations or messages contained within.

Even so, it's still a concern.

More here on the march to 1984.

I'm not too hot on the idea from a civil liberties point of view but aside from that I wonder about the practical logic behind it, if you acquire all that information how can it be used in a sensible and effective way? 60,000,000 people's phone calls, emails, page views etc. over time adds up to a lot of information, are there effective ways of harvesting the information to detect and assess credible threats? On any given day I wonder how many people (fantastically) threaten to commit serious crimes in what they believe are closed media, or for that matter visit potentially nefarious websites, political extremist sites, bomb making instructions, etc.

Considering that any half-intelligent terrorist cell would make all detailed information exchanges using non-electronic information media, this is just an exercise in futility as a means of catching terrorists... but on the plus side, it's a great way of keeping tabs on the citizenry, and seeing what has got them interested.

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Originally posted by ivan astikov

Considering that any half-intelligent terrorist cell would make all detailed information exchanges using non-electronic information media, this is just an exercise in futility as a means of catching terrorists... but on the plus side, it's a great way of keeping tabs on the citizenry, and seeing what has got them interested.

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There are probably stupid terrorists out there, but I suspect you're right for the most part. Just like with airport security in the US, it's more about designing a system to feel secure rather than actually being secure.

What this will be good for is basically sifting through someone's records whenever you need to find something to nail them with. Look hard enough through enough records on someone and at some point they'll say something incriminating.

I think this is being requested more because it is very useful when making a case against someone to have access to these kinds of logs. Part of it is going to be under what situation these records can be accessed.

Data protection act actually says that all records should be destroyed after 7 years and a bit, but I'm not sure if there is any detail on how long for, or even if, a company has to store data.