The Home Office is reportedly preparing to spend a nine figure sum on a single database containing details on all UK communications
According to The Register the Home Office is already working on implementing its plan for such a system, which is not official policy and has been questioned by the information commissioner. The government has said it wants to change the arrangements for surveillance of communications, and will publish a communications bill later this year.
Currently, communications providers retain details of telephone calls, emails and other communications, and pass these to state sector organisations on receipt of a legal request, with some funding provided by the government.
A single communications database would mean the government would automatically gather all this material, which includes telephone billing data, email headers, websites visited, the approximate location of mobile telephone users and information on text messages, instant messenger conversations and internet telephony. It would not include the content of communications.
The Register, relying on unnamed sources, says that the Home Office's Interception Modernisation Programme has recently been expanded under a director level official to commission the database, and has given secret briefings saying that it plans to spend a nine figure sum on the project.
In written parliamentary answers released on 9 July, Home Office minister Lord West of Spithead told the Earl of Northesk that funding for the programme was included within a central bid made by the security and intelligence agencies in the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), and that the exact funding was “currently being finalised between the Home Office and HM Treasury”.
The economy is about to go into freefall
recession, government spending is at an all time high, government
borrowing is running at the highest level ever, and government debt
outstrips all records, and the Government is already spending your tax money (a nine figure sum, so that would be in the £billions) that it does not yet have approved by the treasury on a database to spy on every phone call, email and sms that you send, for which it has no legal base to build as the Communications Bill has not yet been written.
Is everyone in Government on drugs? Just what the hell is going on, this is worse than the Stasi in East Germany or the KGB in the USSR.
I wonder what the taxpayers would rather have their billions of pounds of tax money spent on, an illegal government database spying on its own citizens or keeping the RAF flying and protecting our country rather than selling off our fighter jets.
Under this government, our defences could well be reduced to this.
But, There IS another way!
Your Life, Your Country, Your Choice.
