"… we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can't bear" - Sir Ken Macdonald QC, Director of Public Prosecutions
From the NO2ID campaign …
Our fight against the database state takes place on many fronts. The latest is the Communications Data Bill, which proposes to record - for life - the details of everyone you call or write to and what websites you visit.
This raises not just the prospect of a new, massively intrusive surveillance database, but - according to the Sunday Times - the possibility of compulsory registration of mobile phones. Negative media coverage has forced the Home Secretary to announce further 'consultation' on the Bill in the new year and a flat denial from the Home Office on mobile phone registration (but given that it is already happening in some EU countries, we know who we prefer to believe! - GOS).
We cannot leave it there.
Monitoring your communications is in many ways more intrusive than searching your home. It should only ever be done under warrant with good reason. The general convenience of the Home Office is a very bad reason indeed.
Do you want the State (which in the UK means a large and growing number who can gain access to its systems) to have a record of your religious and political interests, your sexual curiosities, your financial and medical worries, your wider (or narrower) concerns and your special relationships; not to mention a trace of what it reckons 'you' have done on your computer even when it is done by someone else? (It is well known that hackers can infect an unprotected PC with a "trojan" and use it to distribute spam without the owner knowing anything about it. Why else do we all have firewalls? - GOS)
But Jacqui Smith says they are only keeping this information "just in case" it ever become of interest to the authorities.
Were an individual to spy on you like this, it would be called stalking. Which is a crime. It is not a defence for a stalker to claim, "I was only following her in case she fell over". The action of continuous snooping is itself recognised in law as a wrongdoing.
You wouldn't tolerate someone creeping into your home at any time, night and day, to go through your and your family's private things. You shouldn't put up with this.
Please write NOW to your MP - get his address here - expressing your disgust at the British government moving to continually spy on us all, and ask what he or she intends to do about it.
Read more about the government's invasion of your privacy here, here and here.
Recently Sir Ken Macdonald QC, the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions, spoke out about the database-powered surveillance state, saying "Let me, in my final public speech as DPP, repeat my call for level headedness and for legislative restraint in an age of very dangerous movements. We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom's back is broken by the relentless pressure of a Security State.
"But we need to understand that it is in the nature of State power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the State may use these powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible. They will be with us forever. And they in turn will be built upon.
"So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can't bear."
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