Snoopers Charter - Take Two

Here we go again a knee jerk reaction by the politicians that makes potential criminals of us all, and for what something the current legistion gives the powers to the Secert Services and the Police to do, namley snoop on what we are doing on the Internet and beyound.

Under the The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which was further amended in 2003, the Security Services, Police and a number of other Government bodies can collect information about a communications, but not the content of that communication much in the same way as the purposed snoopers charter, in fact this act also allows them to intercept the content of messages in the interests of national security or to investergate serious crimes. The real differance seems to be that the new act collects information on all of us. It would be far simplar to amend the current Act and adding inclusions to cover the adavances in technolgy while keeping it's scope to those people that suspected of a crime or are being investigated in the interest of national security. Clearly the police and the security services need to have upto date powers, but this seems a step to far.

What we are seeing here is the typical over reaction by a Government to something that the current laws were well able to cope with, namely the surveillance of known potential terrorist and criminals. The killers of a serving solider, Lee Rigby, in London were well known to the secret services and they had been investigated on a number of occasions, which I’m sure would have included their electronic communications under the existing laws. In fact the new powers that Government wants to spy on all of us wouldn't have helped prevent what happened that day. Even the senior security sources that talked to the Independent Newspaper are reported to have the same view as me.

The questions you have to ask yourself is do you want these bodies to have all this information even if you haven't done anything wrong, do you trust the Government to not use this data for reasons other than what is stated in the act and who is going to be monitoring the Government to make sure they aren't miss using the data? In fact given the case of police in Manchester who allowed encypted personal data to be stored on a removal USB memory sticks can we even trust them to keep the data safe? In the end it comes down to allowing the state to have vast informationion on us that could as easily be used for wrong reasons as well as the right reasons. Surely don't we all have a right to privacy unless we are surspected of breaking the law?

If you want more information about the The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 you can check out the Wikipedia page. You will be suprised how many Government bodies can actually collect data with the existing act.