UK government plans to log every call, text and email
“The Home office has issued a consultation paper for a new law that would force phone companies, ISPs and network operators to record and store every phone call, web page request and text message.
The information would have to be stored for 12 months by service providers and would be searchable by a wide variety of organisations, including local councils, health authorities, and even Ofsted and the Post Office.”
Every private and business calls being intercepted to and listened to. What the heck is a ‘private’ call anymore? “Can I have a word in private, please?” Well, actually no – you may say something, someone dislikes, so we need to record it just in case…
You thought it was just a paranoid sci-fi TV programme, didn’t you?
Already wireless cameras in central London have microphones attached, listening into street-side conversations. RFID snooping devices hang over the roads monitoring every car movement. Travel through the London transport system is being forcibly implemented via Oystercard. Linked back to purchases, with the likes of Barclaycard’s ‘wave-and-pay’. Mobile phones triangulated, personal photos linked to time and location via your iPhone. All brought about by some clever marketing spin to adopt and make you feel the world is better with, then without. This is sci-fact.
This is an erosion of the sanctity of human life, resulting in everyone being a number akin to being tattooed in jail. We are no more than free-range animals with enforced boundaries, for someone else’s pleasure at some point in the future. We are walking blindly into an abattoir!
What next? Microphones in every church, synagogue, mosque and social gathering meeting room, lest I talk in private about something that someone dislikes? “Speak up,” comes the voice over the speaker in the scout club hut, “we can’t here you!” And what about in homes? Do people discuss offensive plans in private? I am sure they do. Well hey, why don’t we all get forced to have cameras and microphones in our homes too – we can market it to the masses as being able to save them money on their home insurance, lest they get broken into and robbed. That will appease most sheep, while the real foxes can have complete surveillance on habits, moves and discussions in case they mention something against the state.
“Hang your clothes up before you walk in to the shower and please remember your number,” came the PR-spun cry of the SS guards…
When I close my curtains, I do so to protect my privacy and dignity. What goes on behind closed doors, should indeed remain behind closed doors. If I walk around naked in the comfort of my living room, this is acceptable. To do so with curtains open is indecent exposure. This removal of curtains by the government is forcing me to expose everything I am and have.
Silo everyone into groups and buckets. He is a white, male Christian. She is a black, female, lesbian. He is a Chinese, disabled and outspoken. He is an Arabian male, from a broken home and therefore prime to be groomed by terrorist activists…
Does Gordon Brown fancy himself as a dictatorial Hitler?
This flies in the face of everything we have come to know and trust about democracy.
For the sake of a few, the mass is now becoming guilty until proven innocent.
This MUST be stopped.
And people are concerned about Phorm and digital advertising? Open your eyes!!
(But better not open your mouth though, hey?)
I could not agree more with your observations. I have long been concerned that we live in a society where our each and every move is tracked. Not just from overt or covert listening posts and cameras, but also as your rightly highlight, our road and rail travel. Then of course, there is our earnings, our taxes, where we work, where we have worked, where we might work. Some of our most personal information is all but public as well, such as how much we owe on our mortgage, credit cards and even what we buy through the records kept on the point’s cards offered by some of the major retailers and supermarkets.
This truly is a big brother society and we ignore it at our peril.
This government and its predecessors are often to be heard talking about other countries that do not have democracy or are so called police states. So what about the UK? I honestly do not believe that any of these ‘police states’ have the level of surveillance and information gathering that our own does. Yet we vote each successive government in, who then goes on to increase the surveillance and monitoring. It truly is time we put a stop to it.
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