News of Note: New powers to record every phone call and email makes surveillance ’60m times worse’
The proposals, to be unveiled in the Queen’s Speech, will see a huge expansion in the amount of data communication providers are required to keep for at least a year.
It will allow the police and intelligence officers to monitor who someone is in contact with or websites they visit, although the content of such communications will not be accessed.
Mr Davis said: “What this does is make (existing problems) 60 million times worse. The simple truth is that this is not necessary. What’s proposed here is completely unfettered access to every single communication you make.
England is fairly notorious for mass surveillance and unlike the American Patriot Act, they’re hardly trying to slip this in the back door.
We are literally moving into the dystopian future of our worst nightmares, where all of our private emails, phone calls, and internet activity is recorded and available to law enforcement. Not only is this a monumental loss of privacy, think of how much raw power this turns over to the government.
The motivations for increased surveillance of otherwise law-abiding citizens may have begun because of increased terrorism but when government uses that as the only excuse to watch everything you do it annihilates freedom, a too heavy price to pay.
Creative Commons image by: jonathan mcintosh