Ministers cancel 'Big Brother' database
Plan to store details of every phone call and email 'kicked into long grass' after furore
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Independent Minds
ALAMY
The database would have tracked 2.7bn personal emails sent a month from non-work accounts
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Plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit in the United Kingdom have in effect been abandoned by the Government.
The Home Office confirmed the "Big Brother" scheme had been delayed until after the election amid protests that it would be intrusive and open to abuse. Although ministers publicly insisted yesterday that they remained committed to the scheme, they have decided not to include the contentious measure in next week's Queen's Speech, the Government's final legislative programme before the election.
The effect of this move could be to kill off the plans for years. The Conservatives have not ruled out reviving the idea but remain sceptical about the practicality of Labour's proposals.
A Whitehall source told The Independent last night that the project, estimated to cost up to £2bn over 10 years, was "in the very long grass". Civil rights campaigners welcomed the move but warned that ministers were already responsible for introducing a range of databases and surveillance measures that breached basic liberties.
The data retention proposals have been championed by the intelligence agencies and police as a vital tool for tracking terror plots and international crime syndicates. Under the plans, communications companies would keep a record of phone numbers rung, addresses to which emails are sent, details of internet sites visited and the use of social networking sites such as Facebook – and would be required to surrender details to police when asked. They would not hold records of phone conversations or the contents of emails.
The planned Communications Data Bill, which would have created a giant database of this information, was dropped from last year's Queen's Speech in the face of public hostility.
Jacqui Smith, the former Home Secretary, permanently abandoned the database scheme six months ago, preferring the information to be held in different places by private companies instead, and commissioned a consultation exercise to gauge levels of backing for holding more details about telephone and internet activity.
The results, published yesterday, showed lukewarm support for the moves. Only 26 per cent of respondents said they believed the Government's safeguards against abuse of the records to be adequate, while 50 per cent said they were not. Communication companies also raised concerns over whether the proposals would be technically feasible or impose unreasonable burdens on industry.
But the Association of Chief Police Officers said: "If the Government does not maintain the capability or capacity for the police to determine ... who has communicated with whom and when, the police service will face a fundamental breakdown in our ability to function in the communications age."
Civil liberties groups welcomed the shelving of the plan, but said basic freedoms remain under attack on a variety of fronts. Among the most controversial is the ID card scheme which has already been trialled at some airports. The scheme is set to be rolled out nationally by the end of the year, beginning in Manchester. Ministers now say that it will be voluntary.
Earlier this year the Government clashed with the European Court of Human Rights over its determination to allow the police to keep DNA records of innocent people. The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, is expected to announce proposals tomorrow which will balance the court's criticisms with the need to protect Britain's crime-fighting capacity.
Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary, said an incoming Conservative government would examine the data retention plans "from first principles". He said: "Of course we need to take sensible measures to protect ourselves against terrorism and organised crime given advances in modern technology. It's also absolutely essential that any new scheme is not used for any other information gathering purpose. We need proper safeguards to ensure it is not misused."
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "It is no surprise these plans are being shelved until after the election. It allows ministers to continue to be vague about costs and safeguards."
The database: What it would have tracked
7.7bn Text messages sent a month (July 09)
2.7bn Personal emails sent a month (Sept 2009 – web accounts only: Gmail, Hotmail, etc. No figures available for work addresses)
111bn Minutes of calls made from UK mobile phones in 2008
143bn Minutes of calls made from UK landlines in 2008
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Comments
The government can't wriggle on this one, either it was never needed to begin with or it remains essential and is being ditched to benefit New Labour at the expense of our national security. Which is it?
There is nothing this Government likes more than to try to watch us & control!
Mind, you can look at all the other things being rolled out & expanded, such as number plate recognition cameras, face recognition cameras, DNA database, arrest without trial, etc..
They have dropped this idea thank goodness, but what about some of our other "freedoms"
Profit?
Echelon and other electronic data gathering has been going on for years but internal spying and mass monitoring of civilian populations inside the borders has been subjected to some controls until now.
To think the Genie can be put back in the bottle once the full range of these measures is passed is wishful thinking at best. What is unseen is that Governments will continue to subtly extend these abilities as individual data bases are linked and become indispensable to them across a whole range of activity.
They will always be able to quote good reasons, terrorism, crime, border control, welfare fraud etc but the inevitable march to a totalitarian state is now picking up pace and to a large extent even National Governments cannot stop it.
In the case of the UK a lot of this will even be out of its national control and driven from the undemocratic unelected EU executive. We all know the history of Europe, the dictators it throws up with regularity and the move to a Federal state with Presidents etc should worry anyone who is concerned about the mis-use of information and its security.
We must remember power comes from intelligence even more than it does from armies or weapons and with the ability of the ‘elite’ to control events by having access to total information and surveillance of their societies we loose any semblance of democracy and rule by the people.
One has to question wether the UK Government is acting alone or pushing through bills that are required by the EU or the USA and just making them seem palatable to the British public under the guise of controlling domestic terrorism.
They will never answer this or admit it but recent years have shown Westminster to be in less and less control over laws that affect its own people and to be fading into a sideshow as the EU grows.
Trust Europeans with all this power? Most thinking people in Britain would say no but it appears our rich and powerful have already decided to surrender the UK to a Federal Europe – any opposition of course would be monitored and chopped down by the use of intelligence gathering using these laws – it all has its uses for the people that matter.
No, the initiative and the impetus comes from the US. The US is a military society and the very essence of a military society is that all individuals' interests are at one with the stability, continuity and ascendancy of military governance. The need for a military entity to protect the nation as required by the people through democratic representation is transmuted into the military entity becoming the State and the overall determiner of its own existence. All other interests are subject to conformance with the military objectives or is not tolerated.
For some reason, this country has moved from being an indebted junior partner (following Churchill's bankrupting the nation's future to the greedy and selfish US under ) to a powerless underling under Blair.
We need a fundamentally different relationship between the nation and its government here in the UK. We need to have more accountability and openness, not less of both. Abuse of power must be a principle concern; we have ample evidence that MPs of every party do not recognise the concept of service to the public nor accountability. We must have an end to the cross-party cartel; blind party loyalty has given licence to the abuse of our economy and liberty. The EU is a distraction.
That's not what they said, when you shot De Mendez.
The fact that there was no cctv in a tube station to record a crime didn't bother them at all.
Why did they not scream about no cctv in a tube station in the middle of a terrorist alert, the biggest this country has seen. They had nothing to say about that and that was old age stuff.
If you can't cope with the stuff you have new stuff will just confuse you.
Think about it, you may not be able to delete it as easy as cctv.
Where would that leave your members?
Apparently it was 'not available', another excuse was 'CCTV wasn't working that time of the day' etc.
Funny how when it's captured a crime committed by the police it suddenly vanishes into thin air with no trace or accountability. Funny huh?
There probably should be a review as to how exactly such a proposal would ever pass the human rights sign-off that ministers have to do on every piece of legislation
They patently don't trust anyone so why should we trust them? And as for the EU, the EU Human Rights Act is possibly the ONLY safeguard we have left against the Stasi-style surveillance state that has creept up on us. The government is no longer on the side of the people. Too many events have demonstrated that already. NuLabour, NuTory, LibDem all seem determined to spy on the populace. Creeps, the lot of them. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Reproduction - If there is sudden unexplained activity, especially between 10 and midnight, or at anytime in an office or factory, monitored by gyroscopes on the tag, someone is having a bit of nooky. This would enable the health services to monitor probable number of births in the coming year, along with STD's, birth control measures and plan services accordingly. Very useful in divorce proceedings if two regular excited tags do not match up.
Crime - Obviously if one is out late at night in an area where your recorded patterns do no predict then you are up to no good. Best to stay in, just go to work and watch SKY. Holidays are accepted except in certain areas of the world, a GPS enabled tag would be very useful here. Crime will plummet.
Internet use - with a WiFi attachment to your tag, all communication on the internet and on your new compulsory wifi enable land line and mobile phone all your clicking can be monitored for the benefit of analysing societal trends and hotbeds of discontent and who loves Paris Hilton. A peace loving, well heeled society is thus ensured.
To make sure of total compliance, this new tag will implanted in your brain at birth or on an ongoing basis depending on the your age and location, dependent, of course, on the latest crime figures and those we don't like the look of.
If you try to remove this highly beneficial device it has a self destructing mechanism that implodes your brain and all your thoughts, your either with us or against us, there is no in-between.
So there you have it :-)
However, I think the distributed nature of service providers holding the information will be very different from a central government run database. Whilst I still strongly disagree with even the access granted to so many organisations who do not need the access, the distributed nature makes any searches far harder.
With the distributed nature, they have to know your service provider. Given mobile phone number portability, they will first have to establish who your mobile service provider is before they can then ask for details of your calls. They will have to find not only your ISP but all e-mail accounts you may hold (including those overseas) before that can ask who you are sending e-mails to and receiving from. And I wonder how overseas email providers will react to such requests. and as they are not covered by UK laws, if they don't retain this info, I assume all the terrorists the local authorities are trying to find would use an overseas ISP to coordinate their attacks and so the entire law is ineffective anyway - which all shows that Labour just do't understand the internet.
What I am interested in is who pays for the searches. When your local dog warden needs to check what terrorist organisations you have been sending e-mails to, do the council have to pay the ISP for the work involved in providing the information or is it a cost the service providers (and thus the customers) have to pay for (at the end of teh day)
Or maybe they were telling us porkies about the need and function of the database.
Of course there would also be the issue of some jolly govt/social service/police/armed forces type 'whoops' leaving a memory stick they somehow have in their possession on a train, in an unlocked car, in the pub, the gym - you name it.
This whole proposition should have been drowned at birth. Trust? politicians lost my trust and respect a good few years ago.
But just as soon as they find a contractor who puts in the right bid, no doubt..the directors will be ex govt ministers or ex civil servants, and probably have david blunkett as a shareholder or 'adviser', it will be given the kiss of life and back on it's feet. It's all getting read to roll, it's just been put on hold for the moment. Don't be fooled, I've never heard of a govt giving up control, only taking more of it.
It was bloody obvious there were no WMD’s in Iraq – it is now known and so bloody obvious Hitler had the Reichstag burned down with clear political advancement aims in view. Now its bloody obvious with all the collected evidence and a wee bit of common sense that the twin towers was an inside job, but by who?
Finally its bloody obvious that big brother is drawing closer every day, this ‘kicking into the long grass’ of the bill is only a ‘putting it on the shelf ploy’ for some pre-election political advancement, but what’s to be done?
I wonder if this letter will be registered and used against me or my family some day. My mind is open, I can no longer ever trust a government.
I don't trust the govt with anyones data, not my own, or anyone else's. I don't trust the govt to protect me in anycase, all they seem to be doing is making the UK a target.
Vague reasons given to 'protect national security' and 'monitor' all communications sent are a complete whitewash. THe govt wants these databases for control and to infringe on our rights by having every aspect of our lives on databases and tracking/recording everything we do.
We are already constantly spied upon by means of oystercards, phone logs, CCTV, our Chip and PIN transactions, how much more do they need and how much further do they intend to go?
I really get the feeling we are living in some twilight zone 1984 era.
ISPs are still required to log the info, so all your visits to porn sites, medical sites, political sites and emails to your significant other will be logged. Checked out the BNP website out of curiosity? Your activity has been logged, citizen. Wondering if David Icke was right about the lizards? Logged. Been downloading stuff by Chomsky? Logged. Registered with Liberty? Logged. The fact that you've read this article? Logged.
While we're on the subject, we still have the largest DNA database in the world, more CCTV than anywhere else, the ID cards act is *still* in force (together with the National Identity Register which will log every use of the ID card), we still have vehicle tracking on the roads etc. etc. etc.
STAY AWAKE.
We still have a long way to go.
We need a constitution that preserves our freedoms and privacy, at the very least, and a powerful message needs to be sent to political parties over the coming months that we will not put up with this kind of intrusion.
It's all there to 'protect' us and our 'freedoms'. What a wonderful life! Why live in North Korea when you can live the dream right here in the UK?
I trust the Independent saw the irony. The KGB, Stasi etc would have been proud of this government's plans.
I'm OK with that as long as I can keep an eye on the Association of Chief Police Officers and know who is talking to who about what and when. Reciprocity is after all the foundation of civilised society. Or do they have something to hide?
Next we'll be having some unique identifier because the Home Office need to verify exactly who we are, where we are and what we are doing all the time - perhaps a number tattooed on you arm or forehead and a subcutaneaous microchip like DEFRA mandates for pets travelling abroad.
Big Brother Does Not Trust You!
Didn't the government state they had cancelled the secret inquest proposal, we now find it literally passed under the radar, question just what constitutes a lie?
Why should we or the Independent believe the proposed 'spying' of emails etc has been cancelled?
If you really want to know what this government is upto listen what they say then look at what would be diametrically opposite to the statement & that's their true position.
Then when they knock on your door begging for your vote at the next general election little point in asking why you should trust them, just ask them the question just what constitutes a lie?
The reality is one has a greater chance of drowning in a bathtub than being hurt/killed by a 'terrorist.'
Britons are the MOST politically unaware, unmotivated, prone to moaning but doing absolutely nothing to coral the idiots they elect. As scary as it is, Britons deserve the crap perpetrated on them by their imbecilic excuses for politicians. Britons would rather be nearly illiterate, clued out, and working on their fourth pint than doing anything to protect the country from their elected 'officials.'
The only thing beyond beer that Britons put substantial time into is screwing around, commenting on Big Brother and bitching.
The reality is one has a greater chance of drowning in a bathtub than being hurt/killed by a 'terrorist.'
Britons are the MOST politically unaware, unmotivated, prone to moaning but doing absolutely nothing to coral the idiots they elect. As scary as it is, Britons deserve the crap perpetrated on them by their imbecilic excuses for politicians. Britons would rather be nearly illiterate, clued out, and working on their fourth pint than doing anything to protect the country from their elected 'officials.'
The only thing beyond beer that Britons put substantial time into is screwing around, commenting on Big Brother and bitching.