Good News (sort of) from the UK 0
An article on CIOL.com has indicated that the United Kingdom is abandoning a plan to monitor every cell phone call, e-mail, or website visit and store it in a national database:
The British government, which was planning to monitor every phone call, email or website visit and make a national database of the information, ditched the plan on Monday following the criticism from civil liberties groups, which termed the move as a ‘Big Brother’ style invasion of privacy.
The proposal was supposed to give police and security services the power to snoop on every single communication made by the public with the data then likely to be stored in an enormous national database.
Following the criticism, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said on Monday the plan had been dropped, as the government “recognizes the privacy implications” of a database and “does not propose to pursue this approach.”
Unfortunately, with every piece of good news comes some bad news. According to the same article:
Instead, the government would ask the service providers to store and organize information of every electronic communication made by Britons. According to the estimates of the Home Office, introducing the new system would cost up to $3 billion.
The government said providers would not store the content of calls, e-mails or Internet use. They would store the details of times, dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and Web site URLs.
Even though this is a step in the right direction, there is still plenty of work to do to ensure that people’s privacy is protected. I wonder if there is any chance that the U.S. government can learn from the mistakes of our friends from across the ocean.
As Robert Frost once penned:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The same can be said for making sure government protects everybody’s privacy.