In the middle of the most drastic budget cuts since the great depression, with billions being slashed from education and welfare, the Interception Modernisation Programme is coming back to life like some horror movie monster.
Yes, it would seem that Labour’s Orwellian program to monitor everyone’s internet activity has been resurrected by the coalition government to the tune of 2 Billion pounds. This despite pre-election promises by the Liberal Democrats (who seem to have been entirely subsumed into their host party).
To say that this is disappointing is an understatement, and for what good it’ll do there is of course a petition. Given that this new government doesn’t seem to mind if its unpopular, I doubt a petition will do much good.
The coalition has made it abundantly clear where its priorities are.
I think it’s the coalition position that we spy on ourselves, to compensate for the 500,000 local/central government jobs that are vanishing.
The scope of the thing intrigues me. How would anyone mine such a mess of largely unformatted data, especially when some uncooperative people speak several languages? I’m not sure the translation algorithms have been written that can cope with my colloquial Welsh, let alone the personalised Catalan I speak with my daughter.
My understanding is that the programme is more interested in connections rather than content, which is theoretically a little more manageable.
However it does raise the delightful possibility of numerous guilt by association problems…