Details about text messages, phone calls, emails and every website visited by members of the public will be kept on record in a bid to combat terrorism.
The Government will order broadband providers, landline and mobile phone companies to save the information for up to a year under a new security scheme.
What is said in the texts, emails or phone calls will not be kept but information on the senders, recipients and their geographical whereabouts will be saved.
Direct messages to users of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter will also be saved and so will information exchanged between players in online video games.
The information will be stored by individual companies rather than the government.
RT reported:
According to the initiative called the Communications Capabilities Development Programme, the data will be stored for a year and will be available to the secret services.
The security scheme requires Internet providers, landline and mobile phone operators to police their clients in an effort to combat terrorism.
What is said in text messages and phone calls will not be recorded, but much other data, including geographical whereabouts or people involved will be.
The plan is said to have been prepared by the Home Office in collaboration with home security service MI5, the foreign intelligence service MI6 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the body responsible for signals intelligence and information assurance for UK’s government and armed forces.
Rights activists fear potential abuse of the surveillance, as well as hacker threats to the database storing the personal details collected.
“Britain is already one of the most spied on countries off-line and this is a shameful attempt to watch everything we do online in the same way,” Nick Pickles, director of the liberty organization Big Brother Watch told the Daily Mail newspaper.
The plan is expected to be announced in May in the Queen’s Speech. It is a rewrite of a similar plan, which was developed by the Labour party, but had been shelved in November 2009 due to lack of public support. Then in opposition the Conservatives criticized Labour’s “reckless” record on privacy.
“The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats started their government with a big pledge to roll back the surveillance state,” Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group told the Daily Telegraph newspaper. “No state in history has been able to gather the level of information proposed – it’s a way of collecting everything about who we talk to just in case something turns up.”#Link
The news has sparked huge concerns about the risk of hacking and fears that the sensitive information could be used to send spam emails and texts.
Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘Britain is already one of the most spied on countries off-line and this is a shameful attempt to watch everything we do online in the same way.
‘The vast quantities of data that would be collected would arguably make it harder for the security services to find threats before a crime is committed, and involve a wholesale invasion of all our privacy online that is hugely disproportionate and wholly unnecessary.
SPAM? Really? SPAM is what you feel the concern is? Not governmental tyranny.. Hitler/Obama-like behaviors? Spam.