Blair's place in history

[Bart Meerdink]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Blair zal niet alleen de geschiedenis in gaan als de eerste
conservatieve premier die er in geslaagd is om onder de vlag van Labour
aan de macht te komen, het lijkt er ook op dat hij daarbij als
grondlegger van de politiestaat in het VK te boek zal komen te staan.

Tenminste, voor zover we de site 'The Register' mogen geloven (ze houden
er daar van om berichtjes lekker sappig op te dienen :-) ):

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30700.html

UK gov seizes data on 100m calls, 1m users, a year
By John Lettice
Posted: 14/05/2003 at 11:38 GMT

Police and other UK government agencies are demanding personal data
concerning over 100 million phone calls, subscriber data on almost a
million consumers and an unknown quantity of email and Internet logs,
every year, claims Privacy International. The data, to be unveiled today
at Scrambling for Safety 6 at the London School of Economics, is based
on estimates supplied by the Home Office, Ministerial statements, legal
experts, the communications industry and the All Party Internet Group of
MP's, and according to Privacy International director Simon Davies is
"very much on the low side... We literally halved the Home Office
estimate... just to be on the safe side."

The organisation reckons that the information seized could total a
billion individual items of data, including credit card numbers, dialled
numbers and location data from mobile phone service providers. One
individual's file could include thousands of items, which together would
paint a picture of contacts, friendships, interests, transactions,
movements and personal information. And because companies store
information on you for years, what you've been up to all that time can
be checked out by the police, and any other agency the Home Office deems
eligible.

 From the data available it does not currnetly seem possible to produce
estimates of how the monitoring zeroes in within the total annual catch.
A reasonable assessment of the current state of the technology, together
with an educated guesstimate of the enforcement agencies' likely
priorities would lead one to believe that a rather smaller group of
individuals' communications data will be the primary focus. In years
gone by, however, such suspected subversives have included several who
are now senior members of the British government, and the steady
increase in the number of government organisations with the ability to
demand personal data will inevitably increase the amount of data seized,
and broaden the scope of monitoring.

Once you've attracted their attention, they'll more likely than not take
a 'collar the lot' approach to data seizure (as opposed to just calmy
sitting down and figuring how they're most likely to find out why you
apparently didn't pay that parking fine), and once they're sitting on a
huge pile of data they can't easily deal with, technology will more and
more intervene. So you have a million people a year who might have done
something wrong (how many might that be over, say, five years?), so
let's just trawl the lot and see if we can find out what that might be.

The Home Office, bless 'em, has been approving all of this without legal
authority and in defiance of the Data Protection Act, and has so far not
been conspicuously successful - despite its best efforts - in
legitimising the position. Its attempts to widen the list of authorities
with the ability to access communications data failed last year after a
public outcry, and now it's 'consulting.' According to Privacy
International the two published consultation documents so far indicate
that the current surveillance regime is likely to become universal.

As we noted yesterday, Privacy International is encouraging UK consumers
to try to retrieve the information held on them. Details of this can be
found here. [www.privacyinternational.org]

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