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Let's be Like Europe: And completely eliminate personal communications privacy...

... in the name of State security.

From Yahoo:

In a move that even the most nonchalant of privacy advocates is crying foul over, the UK has put into effect a European Union directive which mandates the archival of information regarding virtually all internet traffic for the next 12 months. The program formally went into effect Monday.

The data retention rules require the archival of all email traffic (the identities of the sender and receiver, but not the contents of the messages), records of VOIP telephone calls (traditional phone calls are already monitored), and information about every website visited by any computer user in the country. The rules are being pushed down "across the board to even the smallest company," as every ISP large or small will be required to collect and store the data. That data will then be accessible -- to fight "crime and terrorism," of course -- by "hundreds of public bodies" to investigate whatever crimes they see fit....

The privacy implications of the rule are enormous, as everything UK citizens do online will now be under the watchful eye of EU's powerful Home Office. One privacy advocate, whose anger is clearly barely being held back, called it "the kind of technology that the Stasi would have dreamed of." Naturally, the government counters that this kind of information has already proven invaluable in tracking down criminals, including the killer of an 11-year-old boy a couple of years ago.


Ah, the old If-it-saves-even-one-child-it's-worth-it argument.

Probably the same argument that the Obama administration intends to make for providing the President and Secretary of Commerce virtually the same level of power over the internet with the Cybersecurity Act of 2009....

Funny, aside from Libertarians, all those folks who got around to protesting the Patriot Act and then took up telecom immunity, are pretty much nowhere to be found on this one.

Comments

kavips said…
This is not new here either... We are and have been doing this near the middle of 2004.

Every piece of electronic information is in storage...

That is trillions of tiny pieces... It is preserved and anyone with access can go back and dig up pieces of one's past, to which even they have no record of...

This opens probable cause wide open...

Repeat this is not new...

I have (although not for a while) illuminated where the access points are, the storage areas are, and the extent of the amount collected.

There is a bright spot.. should we suffer an EMP, we could download our past history back into our user files..
Without such, almost all learning stored electronically would be lost forever... We might vaguely remember something, but we could not access the detailed knowledge as we do today...We would instantly return to the 1930s,,

So in essence even though our privacy can be violated simply at one's whim, as a scientist, if our society is to maintain it's current rate of its advanced application to data, this program needs to continue....

Many complain about Tom Carper's move away from his elected values... The answer as to why, is buried in data currently kept hidden for a price...

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