Government unveils plans for Web tracking superdatabase

In September last year I wrote about how “EU legislation turns UK plc into Big Brother” – the fact that EU legislation requires all public WiFi Internet traffic to be monitored and recorded 24×7 “just in case.”

Well, the story has just made another leap forwards because the government has unveiled plans for a private company to run a “superdatabase” that will track all our emails, calls, texts, internet use and so on.

According to The Telegraph, a Facebook group declares 15 June ‘cc all your emails to Jacqui Smith Day’. And they have even set up a website to promote the cause (which you can see here).

Smith’s Orwellian-sounding “Interception Modernisation Programme” (IMP) will be run by a private firm with money allocated from “secret intelligence service budgets”. IMP was dropped from the Communications Data Bill; instead, “senior civil servants will discreetly run the project to swerve potential political opposition to a scheme which would retain details of every phone call, email, and web browsing session of every UK citizen,” according to technology news site The Register.

As The Telegraph says “I don’t know how long the Rt. Hon. member for Redditch spends checking her email in the morning, but she might want to put aside a little extra time on 15 June.”