George Orwell would be proud
Whilst many people are concerned about the amount of data the government and the police holds about us, few realise just how Orwellian we are becoming.
Already police forces across the country are fingerprinting and DNA testing at every opportunity, testing people of any age, guilty or not, without any debate in parliament about DNA databases and appropriate controls against misuse. Likewise, the vast network of CCTV camera and number-plate recognition systems recording our movements means we are the most watched nation in Europe and law enforcement has a diary of our lives.
Now the Home Office is openly talking about its plans to build a ridiculously expensive über-database to record forever the details of every single phone call we make whether that be from our landlines, mobiles or Skype calls over the internet, every email, text message and instant message we send, possibly even every website we visit, all for our own good of course.
Appearing on Question Time, government minister Geoff Hoon was asked how far the government is willing to go to undermine civil liberties in the name of monitoring extremists to which he replied "To stop terrorists killing people in our society? Quite a long way, actually" and then added the utterly vacuous, self-righteous and intellectually offensive claim "And if they're going to use the internet to communicate with each other and we don't have the power to deal with that then you're giving a licence to terrorists to kill people."
So anyone who doesn't want the minutiae of their private lives recorded, correlated and cross-checked is supporting terrorism? One thing is for sure, if this database comes to fruition you'd better be certain your email address isn't on the mailing list of any newsletters which dare to question the government.
18th October 2008