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A UK government plan to store two years of web histories and mobile phone logs in a central database is being greeted with caution from the Conservatives and outright alarm by the Liberal Democrats.
The Lib Dems have slammed the database as “incompatible with a free country”, while IT experts have slammed it as “incompatible with MySQL 5.”
Opposition to the plan centres on the idea that the database would be Orwellian. But the government says there is little alternative: an earlier plan to create a Hobbesian database collapsed after the project team failed to co-ordinate.
Britain’s long history of privacy protection goes back to the Magna Carta, where English barons forced King to agree not to monitor or store the then-dominant form of communication, ICQ.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has played down opposition to the plan, however, saying that the government already stores your negative opinions on the database in a separate system.
Plans for the government to store all text messages sent in the UK were rejected on privacy and grammatical grounds.
The Lib Dems’ Chris Huhne is skeptical about Ms Smith’s plans for public consultation, telling the BBC he feared it could be “just a sham exercise to soft-soap an unsuspecting public.”
Mr Huhne later expressed concern that the soft-soaping of an unsuspecting public would see the shower steam condense on the unsuspecting public’s smooth, milky-white skin and slowly trace down over her curves towards… sorry, what were we talking about?
What the new database means for you
- long-overdue government acknowledgement that they collect and store this data
- lightning-fast downloads of all your most intimate personal information using advanced ADSL2+ technology
- frequent users of porn sites can be identified and receive special loyalty-rewards offers
- the woman at your office who keeps forwarding hoax chain letters can finally be tracked down and gaoled
- remember that movie Tron? That looks so lame now
- the Home Office expects to see a 50 per cent drop in the number of murders and sex-assaults committed using email
- authorities can log in to the database via a cool new iPhone app
- citizens will be able to access data held about them by picking CDs off train seats
- database a joint initiative of the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty
- total elimination of crime via 24/7 surveillance of the population will allow The Bill to completely phase out operations-based plotlines in favour of exploring the characters’ personal lives
- everything is under control
The new database is compatible with neither a free country nor MySQL 5.
