Government Scheme Will Monitor All Communications In The UK

If yesterday’s talk of identity theft made you nervous, you’re not going to like a new £12billion project to monitor the UK’s communications network. Top-secret plans were recently leaked of a new scheme to monitor all telephone calls, emails and text messages in Britain, with hundreds of bugging probes set to be installed in telephone systems and computer networks. The GCHQ spy center has already been given £1billion of taxpayers money to get things rolling, with supporters arguing the benefits of combating terrorism, computer fraud and internet-based paedophile rings.These people are likely to be heavily outweighed by detractors though, with Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID being the first to weigh in with his two-pennorth worth. “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime. This database could have no practical use at all. It would be so big, it would be impossible to find anything useful.” With 57 billion text messages sent last year in Britain and around three billion emails being sent every day, not to mention phone calls, it does seem like storing everything would make it harder to combat crime due to the sheer unlikelihood of stumbling across something suspect. Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve has questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data following a recent series of security gaffes that saw the loss of child benefit records for the entire country. A recent poll by security firm GB Group also showed that only the gambling industry is less trusted by the public to look after private records. Anyone get the feeling our taxes could be put to better use? – Paul Lester [DailyExpress] communications monitor spy