British Government Plans to Spy on All Internet, Text, Telephone Calls and e-mail Traffic

Following on from the governments plans to impose ID cards and use spy planes to monitor the British public, they now plan to monitor all electronic traffic and have already spent £1bn on this with £11bn to follow.

Sunday Times

From The Sunday Times...

Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.

Scary or what?

It seems every couple days theres a new report on Britain creeping closer and closer to an "official" police state. I think they are in over their heads with this one though.

Officials claim live monitoring is necessary to fight terrorism and crime. However, critics question whether such a vast system can be kept secure. A total of 57 billion text messages were sent in the UK last year - 1,800 every second.

How the hell do you moniter 1800 text messages a second?

reply to post by Insomniac


I bet their already doing it - I mean they can get this cellphone info when they look into Murders dont they?

reply to post by ben420


I'm no expert, but by having 'trigger' words I guess. Every communication would be monitored and certain ones would be subjected to further scrutiny. You're right though, the UK seems to rapidly becoming a totalitarian state.

Originally posted by MCoG1980
reply to post by Insomniac

 

I bet their already doing it - I mean they can get this cellphone info when they look into Murders dont they?

Yes, but they can't monitor every call made yet - that's what they're proposing. At the moment they only investigate particular crimes and monitor certain individuals.

I think that this is a rather sinister development.

We all want security, but I seriously wonder where security ends and intrusion begins.

I'm another one that sees this as merely a development of what they already do with Echelon &c.

However, I'm not so sure how realistic this in logistic terms. It's an incredible amount of data to process even if using some kind of data sieving keywords. At the end of this process, there's going to a need for human bodies going through this and there's still going to be an incredible amount of data at the end. This would still entail a massive workforce to work with this as it covers practically all communication in Britain. Also from an IT aspect, I'm not entirely sure just how the government expects to be able work this given the government's past record of large scale IT projects and this would surely dwarf anything currently in existence in this country.

All that said, whether or not this is actually feasible, the actual intent is still obscene.

Also, when I see numbers thrown around as to how much this will cost the taxpayer it's farcical in the current economic climate.

[edit on 5-10-2008 by Merriman Weir]

All of it has been so gradual, now we get this big fat development dropped in our lap.

No one will do anything.

Well, I guess they wont like me very much then.

I would guess that around a quarter of my MSN conversations devolve into nothing more than random speech, of which 99% would probably be one of the trigger words used.

I also use Google ALOT, and will often put in words that I assume will be monitered to find pictures/information as I am curious. Heck I went to the KKK website the other week but I am not racist.


IF this is ever announced on the news as being done, I can guarantee that many of my friends will purposely sit there typing in 'trigger' words, occasionally putting their real search in the middle. It will fail terribly in the long run.

[edit on 5-10-2008 by StevenDye]

[edit on 5-10-2008 by StevenDye]

Originally posted by dodgygeeza
All of it has been so gradual, now we get this big fat development dropped in our lap.

No one will do anything.

I think you're right.

Nobody will do anything.

Hate to tell you but this has been going on for years at GCHQ. This is just being released publicly now but i bet you anything that all of this stuff has been piped through acres of computers for years. I hate the fact it exists, sadly writing in to your MP will just get you put on some kind of watch list and won't change the problem.

If anything, I would say that they have been doing this for a while and are just now trying to get approval for it so that they can actually start using the data that they have gathered.

It is amazing what is going on in the world today.

Well, the UK Governments track record of IT projects is not good. The NHS computer records system is 10 years overdue and the cost has spiralled and is still not ready yet and not likely to be in the near future.

This is all Labour hogwash imo, dont worry folks, we will soon have these bas***** out of office.

Originally posted by Wotan
Well, the UK Governments track record of IT projects is not good. The NHS computer records system is 10 years overdue and the cost has spiralled and is still not ready yet and not likely to be in the near future.

This is all Labour hogwash imo, dont worry folks, we will soon have these bas***** out of office.

Yes, their track record is poor. But they seem, even now, to be capable of tracking down parking-fine offenders and benefit cheats when it suits them

And don't forget that we live in an age of quantum leap technological advances.

Nothing can be dismissed, that is looming on the horizon.

I thought this was already in place with 'echelon'? Or is that something different entirely?

I recommend using TOR - the onion router, this is a safe way of masking your IP and network traffic.

www.torproject.org...

reply to post by Insomniac


Do you live in the UK?

Have you ever lived in a Totalitarian state?

How can you even come close to saying the two are the same? To even believe we are heading that way is quite ignorant of what a true Totalitarian state is like and the suffering of people who actually live in them.

Yes, this is an unwelcome development, but given the Governments abysmal track record on doing something as simple as combining several NHS databases into one larger one, I highly doubt this project will come to anything other than providing IBM or Siemens with a nice little project to add to the balance sheet.

Even if this becomes reality, there is still the minor problem that phone taps etc are still inadmissable as evidence in court, so really all this does is lead MI5/6 onto a trail of interesting persons. It's not as if they will be actively listening to anything bar 0.001% of all traffic. That is, of course, unless they markedly increase the staffing at MI5/6 to around 2 million people.

Having said all that, the Tories will be in come 2010 and they will almost certainly cancel a project like this, if Camerons (excellent) speach the other day is to be believed. This is a typical Left/Socialist Big Government project which goes against the very core of being a Tory.

Originally posted by stumason
reply to post by Insomniac

 

Do you live in the UK?

Have you ever lived in a Totalitarian state?

How can you even come close to saying the two are the same? To even believe we are heading that way is quite ignorant of what a true Totalitarian state is like and the suffering of people who actually live in them.

Hi Stumason,

I didn't say that the two are the same. I was expressing my fear that we are heading that way. If the unthinkable happened and the present government remained in power we cannot predict how far down that path we could travel. Totalitarian states don't have to appear overnight, they can happen with encroachment - this is what worries me.

I thought all communications were already processed for keywords anywho???

en.wikipedia.org...

Originally posted by stumason
Having said all that, the Tories will be in come 2010 and they will almost certainly cancel a project like this, if Camerons (excellent) speach the other day is to be believed. This is a typical Left/Socialist Big Government project which goes against the very core of being a Tory.

I agree with the bulk of your post, but I'm not entirely sure that the Conservatives would necessarily scrap such a scheme purely because of what's thought to be a typical policy.

For example, who'd have thought that Labour would champion Private Finance Initiatives - which are privatisation-lite - the way they have done? It could equally be said that this goes against the very idea of a "Left/Socialist" government.

Also, it's a fact, that with each new government it's not as if we start from scratch and dismantle everything that occurred during the previous government. When it suits, parties are more than happy to continue something that was previously set up by the opposition. For instance, I'm sure you're aware of an absolutely massive socialist scheme based on the Beveridge Report that wasn't scrapped when Churchill came into office for a second time.

For the record, to try and prevent a mind-numbing Labour vs. Tory argument, I don't align myself to any of the major parties. They're all swines as far as I'm concerned.