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Ok, Telegraph link here.
Key lines:
"Records of every electronic communication made by Britons will instead be held by private companies at a cost of around £2 billion."
...presumably, these records will have to made available to government agencies on request, anyway.
She says:
"My key priority is to protect the citizens of the UK, and communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers and paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime.
"Advances in communications mean that there are ever more sophisticated ways to communicate and we need to ensure that we keep up with the technology being used by those who would seek to do us harm.
"It is essential that the police and other crime-fighting agencies have the tools they need to do their job. However, to be clear, there are absolutely no plans for a single central store."
So, her key priority is not to protect our privacy (fair enough, that's presumably not her job), but to protect us from "murderers and paedophiles", amongst other criminals.
This seems a massive step to me, with very little potential pay-off.
Yes, we've used the word "paedophile", yes, the DailyMailReader in us all is automatically reacting to the buzzword and contentedly imagining dirty trenchcoated men being tracked down and perhaps being lynched via the interweb. Well done.
But will email tracking help solve these kinds of crimes in enough cases to warrant the privacy issues? And further, are there enough cases of paedophilia to justify this, anyway?
Or, are we just using emotion to sell the concept?
...what? Oh, I see. You're more concerned that your Barbelith screen-name can't be traced back to you than you are about the safety of four year-old children at the hands of these beasts, are you? You monster. You're as bad as they are.
Meanwhile:
"There were two elements that I think people could be concerned about. One was the state holding the data. The other was the data all being concentrated in one place."
These are, to my mind, the same concern. We accept that the state holds some data about us - address, NI Numbers, DOB, etc. It has to, in order to fulfil its function.
There are a number of pieces of data that it is essential that the state holds, and we surrender those willingly.
The tricky part is when we start adding extra pieces of data to those essential pieces.
My emails, the blogs I read, my text messages, my eBay purchases, my Facebook account and so on; these are not pieces which are essential to the government in order to carry out its day-to-day function. They have no bearing on my interactions with the state.
They are actions that I wish to carry out...well, obviously not anonymously in all cases, but they are outside of my interactions with the goverment. I believe that I have the right to go about my daily life without it crossing over with the goverment, except in those cases where that crossing over is essential for the government to function.
So, does shifting the onus onto the communication providers solve the issue?
Or, is it just smoke and mirrors?
Or, is there a problem at all, if you have nothing to hide? |
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