The UK government is planning to track everything you do on-line and on the phone. Even if you have done nothing wrong, every e-mail you send, every website you visit, every text you send and every call you make will be tracked, logged, categorized and stored for years.
Through an innocuous sounding “Intercept Modernisation Programme”, the government wants telephone and internet companies to send all their logs to a centralized system where it will be made accessible to law enforcement and military agencies at will.
Read more about the threat here, here and here.
Now that your car numberplate is scanned daily and CCTV tracks you up to 300 times per day, the government wants to invade the final bastion of privacy – the sanctity of your own home. In an effort that mimics George Orwell’s dystopian book 1984, it now wants to log all electronic communication between everyone.
Neither terrorism nor crime poses a threat big enough to warrant such sinister intrusion into the daily lives of innocent citizens. While targeted monitoring of potential criminals can be justified in many cases, instantly turning 61 million citizens into suspects is not British, not moral and not befitting for a democracy no matter the threat. Irrespective of the moral implications of this proposed tracking, do you really trust the government to keep all this information secure? How many times have we heard about supposed private information being dropped or intentionally leaked in the last year alone?
We do not want to live in a society where innocent people have to worry about what they say, what they do and how they act. If the Intercept Modernisation Programme, or any programme like it, goes through, it will kill the democracy it is trying to preserve. Even the Information Commisioner, Richard Thomas, has described this as a “step too far“.
Please sign the petition against these plans on the Prime Minister’s website.
If you feel strongly about this, please consider forwarding this information to your friends or tell them about the threat in some other way.
Thank you.
Via Michael Heilemann.
