More on the saving of data.

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To further the point of yesterday's post, I found this link.

Not only is it an invasion of privacy, it would be so easy for good ideas to be abused, especially when it comes to sensitive information that can be used in blackmail by companies, partners or even strangers. As this website says, there are already many companies in the US that will sell you the details of someone's phone bill for only about $100. It wouldn't be long before it would start and happen here in the UK, too - some phone operators in India have already been accused of selling supposedly private and secure personal data. Money can sometimes be enough to persuade anybody. From the article: Joel Winston, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission's Financial Practices Division, said other types of data-theft investigations have shown that "finding someone on the inside to bribe is not that difficult."

I really don't believe that a company being able to track what phone numbers you've dialled and how long for will prevent terrorism. If you were a terrorist, would you make a mobile phone (something which can be traced easily by the Police or investigators) your primary method of communication? And, even if you did, would you keep that number for very long? I'm not a terrorist, but I don't think it takes a genius to realise that you wouldn't.

It's the same with the Internet and email. All Internet activity is monitored anyway (and anyone can do a simple IP check) by the Government, and although suspicious data is usually kept for future reference and to keep an eye on anyway. It would be an almost impossible task to keep all the data - especially six month's worth - and about 99% of it would be useless. And to leave it to the ISP's themselves to do, which would cost them millions of pounds in servers to keep and would not benefit them at all. Yes, I realise that NTL, AOL, BT and others earn billions of pounds and so they could easily afford it, but what about the smaller, less popular companies? If it was mandatory, it would be just another way of monopolising the market. Not only do Microsoft already have the upper hand in the software world right now, but so would AOL, as the smaller companies that couldn't comply with this law closed down. I fail to see how this would be beneficial to our country and economy.

Mostly terrorists they operate via word of mouth - it can't be traced, monitored, detected, or saved for later analysis. The sooner our idiotic Home Secretary realises this and learns not to talk out of his arse about things he doesn't understand, the better. From the original BBC article: "This is an issue of international agreement and that is what I will be discussing with my European colleagues in Brussels on Wednesday." If this is true, and they decide to go ahead with it, I will despair in the people who are supposed to be leading us.