The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition is pushing ahead with plans to allow Britain’s security services and police to spy on the activities of every citizen who uses a phone or the Internet. The secret services and police will have unlimited powers to track every single phone call, email, text message and website visit made by anybody in the UK.
The plans were contained within last month’s “Strategic Defence and Security Review” in which the government stated, “We will introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications within the appropriate legal framework.”
They are based on reviving, with a few modifications, the Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) first proposed in 2006 by the previous Labour government. The government is implementing this massive surveillance dragnet, despite making an election pledge that it would not do so. The pledge was specifically cited in the “Coalition Agreement” for government, published May 12...
The reality is that the government has been developing these anti-democratic plans throughout the six months it has been in office. In a barely known and little publicised document, the “Home Office Draft Structural Reform Plan” released in July, the coalition stated it would, “Publish proposals for the storage of internet and e-mail records, including introducing legislation if necessary”. Using language George Orwell would immediately recognise as “Doublespeak”, the proposals were listed in a section entitled, “Protect people’s freedoms and civil liberties”.
The powers that the government are proposing to, have never been achieved by any regime in history, even in dictatorial states such as fascist Germany...
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/bspy-n01.shtml
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