Government will spy on every call and e-mail.

Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the Internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest Internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m Internet customers.

tinyurl.com/4eexts

Thousands will die of fuel poverty this year. In some parts of the country over 90% of children are living in poverty. The Labour Government would prefer to spend billions spying on our citizens.

The justification that this measure is necessary in order to prevent crime is bogus, since a far greater crime is proposed - breach of citizens' rights to privacy and freedom of speech. Furthermore, the inevitable 'loss' of this information in due course will simply open the floodgates to further crimes.

I suspect that the truth behind this control freakery is that New Labour want the information themselves in order to target their political activity, and possibly also to enable their donation-supporting friends to better target theirs.

Robin T Cox wrote:
The justification that this measure is necessary in order to prevent crime is bogus, since a far greater crime is proposed - breach of citizens' rights to privacy and freedom of speech. Furthermore, the inevitable 'loss' of this information in due course will simply open the floodgates to further crimes.

I suspect that the truth behind this control freakery is that New Labour want the information themselves in order to target their political activity, and possibly also to enable their donation-supporting friends to better target theirs.I think GCHQ will have their work cut out to process all our communications to find, whatever it is they are trying find, the task is enormous. Further, the systems needed will eclipse , the computer and "teething" problems suffered by the NHS, Air Traffic Control, etc which are still ongoing.