Tuesday May 20, 2008

UK Government Considers Phone call and Email Database

Okay so here's an example of the sort of thing that gets my hackles up ...

According to this article on the BBC website, UK government ministers are to consider plans for a database holding details of every phone call made and email sent within the nation.

Aside from the fact that this presents an ethical dilemma between national security and reasonable individual rights to privacy (which is a separate rat hole in and of itself), this also illustrates just how poorly our government representatives understand technology.

I mean, unless they plan to capture every single octet of data on the wire, anyone wishing to make nefarious phone calls or emails to plot against national security can easily circumvent this. Do they plan to try and get the Skype P2P network updating their database? :) Do they have some clever way of detecting email that isn't sent over the standard ports? Nope - this is another great way to burgle the taxpayer. Dumb!!

(2008-05-19 22:26:47.0) Permalink Comments [1]