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| UK Set to Spy on Phone, Internet Users |
| Companies to store information on all communications for at least 12 months |
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Peter Hinchliffe (Hinchy)  |
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Published 2008-08-18 04:07 (KST) |
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The British government wants records kept of all mobile phone and text messages and use of the Internet.
The Home Office says storing electronic communications data is vital in the fight against terrorism.
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| Government ministers seek to compel telephone and Internet companies to store information on all communications for at least 12 months.
They intend to allow hundreds of public organizations to access this information during investigations into crime and possible terrorist acts.
Local councils, health authorities and other public services will be allowed to dip into this vast storehouse of information obtained by electronic snooping.
Public investigators across Europe will also be able to access the dates, times and contacts of phone and Internet traffic.
Telecommunications firms will hand over information to a central storage center. The contents of phone calls and text messages will not be stored, but details of every phone and text message received or sent, along with every Internet message or search made, will be available for official investigation.
A report in The Guardian newspaper said the Home Office had conceded that a billion incidents of data exchange every day will have to be stored, at a cost to the telephone and Internet companies of more than 50 million pounds a year.
If the new snooping proposals do become law, Britain will have moved another giant step toward the surveillance-obsessed society imagined by one of the country's greatest 20th century writers, George Orwell.
His famous novel, 1984, published 60 years ago, begins "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Orwell imagined a society in which an all-powerful government could invent its own "truths," maintaining its authority by electronically monitoring its citizens through every moment of their lives.
British citizens going about their daily business are now closely watched by more than four million closed circuit TV cameras.
There is a "spy" camera for every 14 people in the country. A fifth of all the world's CCTV cameras are in use in the U.K.
The average Londoner is monitored by cameras up to 300 times a day.
Far from rebelling against the ever-increasing number of CCTV cameras, many welcome them as deterrents to crime and bad behavior.
Official snoopers will have plenty of material in which to delve if they do dip into the official electronic message bank. Britons are addicted to using mobile phones and surfing the Net.
A recent report by Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the U.K. communications industries, said the nation's television watching habits had changed dramatically.
Families no longer give their undivided attention to the TV screen. Many keep only a casual eye on the TV while talking on the phone, sending or receiving text messages, or using a laptop with a mobile broadband connection to surf the Internet.
Ofcom reported that the average Briton spends 218 minutes a day watching TV and 24 minutes a day online.
Britons sent nearly 60 billion text messages last year, a 36 percent increase on 2006. On average people talk for 10 minutes a day on a mobile phone.
The Ofcom report revealed that online advertising increased 40 percent last year, totaling 2.8 billion pounds. It has surpassed the amount spent on advertising on the country's commercial TV channels.
New Web-friendly smart phones are resulting in a dramatic increase of people using mobile links to the Net. In May this year, almost 16.5 million Britons accessed the Internet through their mobile. An average of 135,000 new users every month link to the Internet with mobiles.
Many Britons are not security conscious when they dispose of old computers. A recent newspaper article warned, "Your hard drive is watching you: it's the spy in the machine. It records all you do online -- where you go, what you look at, what you read and write. And that data can live on even if you think you've wiped it away. Like a traitor, your hard drive could reveal far more about you than you ever wanted it to."
People think the delete key gets rid of unwanted files. It simply tells the computer that space is available to be written over again. The file often is still all there. As we use computers, they are in effect compiling a dossier of our lives.
Nineteenth century Britons were far more alert to the protection of their privacy. Author Kate Summerscale, in her prize-winning book The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, an account of an investigation into the murder of a child at a large private house in 1960, writes:
"The English public had a horror of espionage. There had been outrage in the early 1830s when it came to light that a plainclothes policeman had infiltrated a political gathering. In this climate the detectives had to be introduced by stealth.
"The public wariness persisted -- a Times editorial of 1845 warned of the dangers of detective police, explaining that there 'always will be, something repugnant in the bare idea of espionage.'"
Those doughty 19th-century Brits would undoubtedly have been fostering rebellion against a government that is eager to record details of who they talk to, who they send messages to and what information they seek in the Internet's vast electronic "library."
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©2008 OhmyNews
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