"Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.
GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.
Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers."
Unsurprisingly:
"The Home Office stressed no formal decision had been taken but sources said officials had made clear that ministers had agreed “in principle” to the programme.
Officials claim live monitoring is necessary to fight terrorism and crime. However, critics question whether such a vast system can be kept secure. A total of 57 billion text messages were sent in the UK last year - 1,800 every second. "
As usual this is being justified under the pretext of fighting crime and the usual helpful fools will be spouting "if you have nothing to hide...", "if it prevents one serious crime...." and "will nobody think of the children?". These arguments are spurious, this measure like so many from this Labour government is about control. The only cheery piece of news is that this Labour government are so inept and unable to implement big IT projects that any introduced system will not work properly, on the downside the security will also be crap and have more gaps in it than Peter Mandelson's CV.
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