Jacqui Wants "Openness"

Jacqui Smith has set out plans to give the police and security services more powers to gather phone and e-mail data.

But wait:

"I want this to be combined with a well-informed debate characterised by openness, rather than mere opinion, by reason and reasonableness," she told the IPPR.

Well, that's alright, then. Except:

"What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area - the principles of proportionality and necessity."

What, like ID cards, you mean?

Note, too, that when she says this:

"There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online."

There is also this:

Plans to collect more data on people's phone, e-mail and web-browsing habits are expected to be included in the Communications Data Bill, due to be introduced in the Queen's Speech in November.

Which, assuming it's correct, means that "web-browsing habits" - IP addresses et al. - *would* be stored, which are potentially even more incriminating that email, texts or chats....

The UK Super-Snoop DB: DOA

The government is pressing ahead with plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a massive central silo for all UK communications data, The Register has learned.

Home Office civil servants are working on plans for the database under the banner of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). The team has recently been expanded and a director-level official appointed to run the project, which is not yet official policy in public.

Sources said secret briefings revealed the cost of the database would run to nine figures and has already been factored into government spending plans. The IMP budget was part of the intelligence agencies' undisclosed allocation in the Comprehensive Spending Review last year. In an answer to a parliamentary question on 8 July, the Home Office refused to provide any budgetary details, citing national security concerns.

The sum will dwarf the £19m we recently reported the government has given telecoms companies to service authorities' data requirements since 2004. The überdatabase will render existing arrangements for sharing communications data with government agencies obsolete.

It's a times like these that I fall on my virtual knees and bless the cyber-gods that ensure every single major UK government project is a complete and utter failure, so this doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of ever working properly. Phew.

Data Snooping Mission Creep

Oh, look, what a surprise: it's not just for anti-terrorism:

Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are to be given the power to access details of everyone's personal text, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday.

And, look, they still haven't learned about the dangers of centralised databases:

The government has already indicated that it intends to go one step further this autumn by introducing a draft communications bill which would require all the telecommunications companies to hand over this data to one central "super" database so that the police and other public authorities will be able to access it directly without having to make a request each time to the individual company holding the records.

Well, at least that will make it easier to steal....