Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Now the Government Wants my Phone Number

On the draft application form for the national ID cards - may the plan be cursed - that the government is determined to introduce at a cost to the tax payer of billions of pounds, applicants are required to provide "a contact telephone number."

That's a strange request, since the ID cards - curse them - will not contain the bearer's phone number, nor will it be stored on the national database.

This rather begs the question as to why the government should require these phone numbers, which, let it be understood, are not subject to the same regulations concerning privacy and security that will govern the cursed database and ID cards themselves.

I cannot bring myself to believe that the collection of these phone numbers will have anything to do with the government's other big database initiative - to collate all of our phone and internet records, all in the name of national security. Nor can it have anything to do with the money that can be made by selling on these numbers to private sector companies.

Sir Ken McDonald, recently retired Director of Public Prosecutions, made this comment on the government's planned communications database.. I can't improve on this as a critique of what is wrong at the heart of this agenda:

"The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile.
We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people."
No other country is considering such a drastic step. This database would be an unimaginable hell-house of personal private information.
It would be a complete readout of every citizen's life in the most intimate and demeaning detail. No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls.

source


This is the party that won only 15.3% of the popular vote at the most recent electoral test they took part in. Hopefully, we have only months to go before we can finally give this government the Parliamentary electoral kicking it deserves for introducing this oppressive database state and for taking our country into an illegal war of aggression in Iraq.







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1 comment:

Steve Smith said...

Nicely put