The government Interception Modernisation Programme (gIMP), a plan by spy chiefs to centrally collect details of every phone call, text, email and web browsing session of every UK resident, will be in place by 2012, according to a Home Office minister.
Apparently:
because communications providers already hold information about who contacts whom, when and how, the gIMP would not represent a major change. "We are not proposing that data that have never been collected are held," he said. "The question is how in the future, with all the changes that are coming we can still have access to something that we regularly use today for serious crime and counterterrorism." The final system will be fully compatible with human rights legislation, he said.
This shows once again that the Government either doesn't understand - or feigns not to understand - that putting together disparate information *is* a huge change, precisely because it allows all kinds of *new* info to be gathered about the public thanks to correlations and cross-linkings that are not evident when the data is held separately. Crudely speaking, this is putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to see something whole.
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