In all the fuss over the Spending Review, you will almost certainly not have seen that the appalling “Intercept Modernisation Programme” is to continue.
Let me explain. Buried in the recently released Strategic Defence and Security Review are government plans to introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications.
This, in no disguise at all, is the Intercept Modernisation Programme – which will allow the security services and the police to spy on the activities of everyone using a phone or the internet.
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Every communications provider will be obliged to store details of your communications for at least a year and obliged in due course to surrender these to the authorities. The state will therefore be able to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public, on the absurd pretext that it will help to tackle crime or terrorism (and by the way, the significant costs of the programme will of course be passed on to . . . you).
This comes despite the Conservative Party’s recent pledge to reverse the rise of the surveillance state.
I appreciate that this invitation may not be a welcome one for Staggers readers, but if you can bear it, do please have a look at that last link. It’s remarkable that they’ve left the paper on the party’s website; perhaps the thinking (and I say this as a Tory) is that everyone’s so concerned with the Spending Review that nobody will notice the rank hypocrisy?
Whatever the explanation, leaving it up breaks with the long-standing tradition of repainting the commandments on the side of the barn whenever Napoleon changes his mind.
This U-turn can’t be blamed on the formation of the coalition. The Liberal Democrats are (or hitherto have been) admirably sound on the issue and the coalition agreement promised to “end the storage of internet and email records without good reason”.
Couple this with the disgusting U-turn on the Summary Care Record, in which all of our medical records are to be lumped together in one convenient-to-leak, convenient-to-snoop, convenient-to-break database (despite similarly clear and concrete pre-election promises from both governing parties to the contrary), and a troubling picture emerges.
It is fascinating and dreadful to see the speed of bureaucratic capture, the reversion to bureaucratic authoritarianism on show. Intrusions are piling up so fast that my extended essay published last week is already out of date.
Just see how the surveillance state is being reversed, eh!?
Alex Deane is director of Big Brother Watch, a barrister and a former chief of staff to David Cameron.