A Distorted Reality.

The Times reports upon Home Office plans to centralise a database of phone calls, text messages, emails, internet and VoIP history.

I cannot see how this could possibly be justified. What’s the need for a centralised database of all communications? For the prevention of terrorism, it is beyond a nihilism: the fear of being ‘watched’ really wouldn’t stop anyone from doing anything. Encrypted alternatives such as Tor and Freenet will just be adopted for these more ‘nefarious’ means.

Given our current government’s record with handling information, I can’t help but think that this is just a means for them to make losing important information far more simple. The pragmatist inside me would also argue that it’s a money making scheme, just as the likes of Phorm are: Brown has himself already said that information from the proposed National Identity Register would be sold by the government to interested third parties. What’s the difference here? The possibilities for targeted marketing are endless: those pointed out as chlamydia sufferers through their text-based communications could be marketed prophylactics; those identified as having any given terminal illness could be offered great deals on life insurance, funerals and the latest in coffin couture.

This, as with all proposed legislature of its kind, will attract the, in my view, deplorable argument that is: ‘if I’ve done nothing wrong, what do I have to fear?’. Martin Niemöller put it best in his ‘first they came…’ poem about the imposition of the police state in Nazi Germany. Of course, we are talking on different scales, but there is most definitely a ’slippery slope’ involved with both: if you willingly surrender one aspect of liberty, those who would seek to see you surrender more will push their agendas until it happens. The paranoid side of me would see the risk posed by crackers to one, huge database of everybody’s information: it’s inherently vulnerable; and given previous disasters such as the NHS computer system’s implementation going to pot (with a failed Computer Studies student at its helm in Richard Granger), I wouldn’t trust the competence of our supposed civil ’servants’.

Personally, I’ve already got my solutions to any potential monitoring of any of my activities: I only send boring emails and text messages and I encrypt all of my non-file downloading internet traffic. Call me a tin-foil hat wearing obsessive, but I’ve always believed that a good offence is the best defence in situations like these.