It was revealed by the Daily Mail recently that an astonishing £380 a minute will be spent on surveillance in a massive expansion of the Big Brother state. The £200 million-a-year sum will give officials access to details of every internet click made by every citizen - on top of the email and telephone records already available.
This is a 1,700% increase on the cost of the current surveillance regime.
LibDem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne described the sum as 'eye-watering'. 'There is already enough concern at the level of Government snooping,' he said. 'In an era of tough spending choices, it cannot be a justified response to the problems we face as a country to lavish millions of pounds a year on state spying. The increase in money spent on tapping phones and emails is all the more baffling when Britain is still one of the few countries not to allow intercept evidence in court, even in terrorist cases.'
State bodies including councils are already making one request every minute to spy on the phone records and email accounts of members of the public. The number of snooping missions carried out by police, town halls and other government departments has rocketed by 44 per cent in two years to a rate of 1,381 new cases every day.
Ministers say the five-year cost of the existing regime is £55.61million, an average of £11million a year. This is paid to phone companies and service providers to meet the cost of keeping and providing private information about customers.
The cost of the new system emerged in a series of Parliamentary answers. It is to cover payments to internet service providers so they can store mountains of information about every customer for a minimum of 12 months, and set up new systems to cope. The actual content of calls and emails is not be kept - only who they were from or to, when they took place and where they were sent from.
Police, security services and other public authorities can then request access to the data as part of investigations. Some 653 bodies are currently allowed access, including councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service and fire authorities and prison governors. The new rules allowing access to internet records will be introduced by Parliament before the end of the year. They are known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme.
Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a massive Government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns. Yesterday Alex Deane, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: 'The Government is preparing to make British people pay through the nose so that they can track our movements online.'
But a Home Office spokesman said the costs involved were entirely separate from those necessary to comply with the European Data Retention Directive, which requires the storage of phone and email records. 'Communications data is crucial to the fight against crime and keeping people safe,' he added. 'We have made clear that there are no plans to collect and hold the content of everyone's communications.'
There were 504,073 applications made last year to intercept email and telephone records under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. It was passed ostensibly to fight terrorism. But it has been used to spy on people suspected of putting their bins out on the wrong day, dropping litter and attempting to cheat school catchment area rules.
GOS says: Absurd. And very, very stupid because it won't work, which is what happens when decisions are taken by politicians who know nothing about the thing they're trying to control.
It will take the IT world very little time to come up with measures we can all take to preserve our anonymity. In fact they exist already, in the form of remote proxies. Although at present they're hard to use and their performance is a bit iffy, it's only a question of improving and refining. My prediction is that within five years we'll all be able to use totally spy-proof browsing at a very modest cost.
The advent of web-based email systems like Hotmail, DCEmail and Fastmail has made it easy to have false email accounts (I've got one myself), with the added bonus that you can access your emails wherever you are, and that you won't lose all your messages and your address book when your own computer crashes. The one I use, Fastmail, is free, completely reliable and much faster than any other system I've tried. I love it!
Then there's the question of who is to do all the monitoring? It's perfectly true that at the moment an ISP can track and record every movement you make on the internet, but how many people is it going to take to follow your activities?
The answer is ONE. If you spend all day, every day on the internet as I frequently do, it'll be a full time job for one person to monitor my records and open every URL to find out exactly what I've been looking at and who I've been talking to. So that's one nasty little jobsworth crouched behind a computer monitor for every single computer-user in the country.
That's clearly unrealistic, so the only thing they can do is wait until we come to their notice by infringing the law in some way - say, by being wicked enough to resist while being mugged, or playing hopscotch on the pavement, or leaving our bins two inches open, or feeding the ducks, or complaining about our children's schooling, or just by being middle-class - and then start looking at our internet activities.
So, suppose they only investigate when there's an actual offence. That's 43,000 minor wounding offences, 16,000 cases of theft from a workplace, 527,000 other thefts, 432,000 robberies, 3,000 cases of stealing mail, 104,000 stolen bikes, 12,000 vending or cash machines broken open, 160,000 stolen cars, 102,000 muggings, 291,000 cases of shoplifting, 53,000 sex offences, 280,000 burglaries and 780 murders - I got as far as that and gave up with a total so far of nearly 2 million and 24 thousand, and I didn't even get close to looking up the old ladies who drop biscuits in the street, the pensioners who swear down the phone at the man from the local council, the health and safety criminals who send their children to school with a slice of birthday cake or the householders who allow their children to fly the skull and crossbones over the garden shed ...
There's one thing you can say for it, though. If they really do put all this into place, it could solve the problem of unemployment at one fell swoop. For the whole of Europe, probably. Except they'll probably outsource the whole massive surveillance machine to India.
Hey, now there's an idea! Why don't we outsource our entire government to Mumbai or Hyderabad? They could hardly do any worse, and I bet Indian MPs have far more modest ideas about their expenses claims. Of course we wouldn't know who the hell we were voting for. Nothing new there, then ...
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