Big Brother government should back off

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COMMENT: That email you just sent to your boss, that text you sent your sweetheart, that quick call to your mum at lunch – the government wants to know about all of it.

After many months of casually talking about it, the Home Office has released plans detailing the type of access it wants to communications data. They'd like to see anything from mobile phone calls and text messages, to email and social networking sessions. While it promises to not look at what you’re saying, the government does want to know who you’re speaking to and when – and how you go about doing it.

Why? According to government and police spokespeople, it’s the only way to fight organised crime, terrorists and peadophiles in this modern age. All those baddies are using the internet, so the white knights from Whitehall want to protect us using the net, too.

Noone, not even the most vociferous privacy campaigner, can have any complaint against police watching the internet traffic of a known peadophile or a suspected terrorist. But government leaders are being incredibly lazy about this new round of regulation, ignoring any right to privacy – and they’re making us pay for it, too.

Now that the government has ditched the rather insane idea to gather all this data into its own central database – which was cost prohibitive crazy talk – the Home Office is now working to guarantee itself access to that which is already held.

ISPs are already required to keep browsing information, while mobile phone companies do so as part of their business – that’s how they manage their billing. But now the government wants to be able to see all those bits whenever it chooses.

Rather than giving itself free and easy access to such data, the government should be requiring warrants and probable cause – yeah, I’m midway through watching The Wire, okay? – for police to see a single bit of it. This would require investigators to have a target, rather than go fishing for patterns in a sea of information about innocent people.

The Home Office document notes: “Public authorities will only ever access a very small proportion of the data that communications service providers will continue to collect and retain and will do so primarily in the context of a criminal investigation or threat to life.”

Note the "primarily," there.

That access will be managed under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). That would be the same act local authorities have been using to spy on people who are committing benefit fraud, vandalising cars and not putting their bins out properly. Hardly Al Qaeda, is it?

So is this really about protecting us from terrorists? And if not, why do it? For control? For convenience? Who knows. But the people of the village of Broughton stood up to Google over privacy, so maybe it’s time they and the rest of us do the same to this government.

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