According to that egregious control freak and bully boy, John Reid, it is to protect us from nasty people.
In May 2007, Sana Ali was murdered. She was 17 years old, and 10 weeks pregnant. At first, police arrested her husband and a 16-year-old boy, but both were later released on bail. At the trial, communications data helped to implicate Sana Ali’s real murderer – Mr Ali’s mistress, who was jailed for life. Communications data also exonerated her husband.
Well, yes, going through the communications of someone suspected of a crime is fair enough. Treating us all as suspects is not.
Used in the right way, and subject to important safeguards, communications data can play a critical role in keeping us safe.
Oh, copypock! What utter balderdash! Piffle! They won’t use it the right way and you can be damned sure they won’t abide by any safeguards. This is the reassurance of a proven charlatan. And, frankly, I neither need nor want John Reid and his gang of halfwitted trough snufflers keeping me safe. I’ll take my chances, thank you very much.
It helps investigators identify suspects and solve life-threatening situations.
Yeah, right. Like all those foiled terror plots that weren’t actually, you know, terror nor plots.
It can assist the emergency services locating vulnerable people.
You’re scraping the barrel, John, old bean. If I was “vulnerable” I doubt I’d want to be hanging around while plod waded through my ISP’s server logs. I’d probably die waiting – of old age, while they locked up some unsuspecting innocent on the basis of having looked at the wrong emails and drawn the wrong conclusion.
And it is critical to protecting national security against terrorism.
Yup, just a smidgen of scrapings down there somewhere. The last refuge of the charlatan, when faced with the paucity of his argument, is to wheel out the terrorism argument. Remind me, just how many people have died in the UK from terrorist activity since the IRA went into retirement? Oh, yes, less than one hundred – out of a population of sixty million. And, to deal with this small threat, you want to treat us all as suspects? Not too OTT, then.
Modern communication, like modern life, gets more complex and people can now choose to email, often using a number of different names and email addresses; they text, join social networking sites under various guises, speak over the internet and their options and usage grow month by month.
Indeed so. And why not? And the more that HMG seeks to spy on us, perfectly innocent, yet web savvy folk will obfuscate that information in order to preserve their privacy. Quite reasonably – because, despite the risible excuses offered in Reid’s pathetic attempt to justify arrant control freakery, who we communicate with is none of their damned business and I, for one, intend to make sure that with my communications, it stays that way.
Of course there must be stringent safeguards to control how data can be obtained. Provided these safeguards are met, we can continue to strike the right balance between privacy and security. And we can continue to maintain a capability that allows us to save lives, help convict the guilty and protect the innocent.
Or, given previous form, the exact opposite…
From this point on, the article descends into unintentional gibberish. Clearly the cut’n’paste gnome has been at work. Mind you, it makes more sense than Reid…
This government really are National Socialists and enemies of the people. Their dishonesty, sheer incompetence and thuggishness are chilling.
As for “Doctor” John Reid, he was Blair’s rottweiler apologist for the Iraq war. He said the Home Office was not fit for purpose. It isn’t, and he never was.
Wasn’t there a cunning Firefox plugin that issued random google searches every few minutes essentially to mask your actual search behaviour?
Can’t remember the name of the plugin, but that’s essentially all it will take to undermine fatally this sort of proposal – the real data will be completely masked in noise (and it massively multiplies the load on the monitoring system).