Statebook - what do you want to know about your citizens today?
11 April 2009
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Plenty of talk at the moment of the ‘Database State’, and the recent Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust report did an excellent job of scrutinising and cataloguing the complexity and insecurity of the government’s various banks of knowledge about its citizens, much of which already breaches our human rights.
For a more digestible and satirical summary of all the ways Jacqui Smith’s Home Office and other departments and spooks are keeping an eye on you, have a look at Statebook, a superb new spoof government site from the Open Rights Group.
It shows what sort of travel, work, communication, health, education and employment data is being kept at present by the government, along with a stark warning about the current ‘Intercept Modernisation Programme’ which aims to take the communications data that is now being hoarded by ISPs and telephone companies and putting it into – you guessed it – an enormous government database.
Since the start of this month, new rules mean that your telephone company must maintain a record of all your phone calls and, similarly, your broadband provider has to keep details of your email traffic (not the messages themselves, but the header information, including who you are emailing). Under the rules (brought in via an EU Directive) both types of providers must keep the information for 12 months and make it available to government agencies on request.
So far, so intrusive, but the next steps are genuinely scary. We may not live in a 1980s police state, but Jacqui Smith seems determined to be far better tooled up than Erich Honecker in the surveillance department.
Under ‘Intercept Modernisation’ the data captured under these rules is planned to extend to messages sent via social networking sites as well as traditional email. And, in addition, all this data may be put into one central database, making it a goldmine for anyone with legal authorisation (something that will no doubt extend far beyond terror-fighting cops within weeks of going live) to trawl for ‘interesting’ patterns of behaviour.
As with every other recent measure supposed to keep us safe from bad guys, these planned systems are ripe for mission creep, with fighting serious crime likely to give way to monitoring peaceful dissidents and nabbing catchment area cheats - along with all manner of other intrusions - with frightening speed.
The Statebook site provides helpful links to email your MP about the plans and keep in touch with future campaigning. So, if the prospect of being more spied-upon than the cast of ‘Das Leben der Anderen’ makes you uneasy, now’s the time to make your voice heard.
Me
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