p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P| Politics:- The British government as taken one incredible step further in its slow transition to a hard-core Big Brother totalitarian regime of the like only seen in China and the US.

It’s already infamous as the country with the largest number of closed-circuit TV cameras, spying on citizens 24/7.

Now it wants to snoop on Net traffic, listen in on phone calls and read emails.

Raw data, “would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database,” says The Telegraph, going on:

“The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.”

Earlier in the week, BT, AOL Europe, O2 and BSkyB were, “given a presentation of the issues and the technology surrounding the Government’s Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), the name given by the Home Office to the database proposal,” says the story, continuing:

Security and intelligence agencies want the data to help fight serious crime and terrorism, they were told.

What isn’t clear is, “what the Home Secretary, GCHQ and the security services intend to do with all this information in the future,” a source close to the meeting told The Independent, adding;

“They said they only wanted to return to a position they were in before the emergence of internet communication, when they were able to monitor all correspondence with a police suspect.

The difference here is they will be in a much better position to spy on many more people on the basis of their internet behaviour.

“Also there’s a grey area between what is content and what is traffic. Is what is said in a chat room content or just traffic?”

Says the story:

“A spokesman for the Home Office said that Monday’s meeting provided a ‘chance to engage with small communication service providers’ ahead of the formal public consultation next year.”

The Telegraph – Internet black boxes to record every email and website visit, November 6, 2008
The Independent - Government black boxes will ‘collect every email’, November 5, 2008

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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