Store cleaner to aisle 3, store cleaner to aisle 3

Woopsy, the global economy has had a small accident.

By small, I mean a $1 quadrillion ($1,000 trillion) accident.

Just don’t worry that the gross domestic product (GDP) of the planet was ~$54 trillion last year.

Or put it another way, less than 6% of the current outstanding debt.

Not to worry, Super Gordon will sort it out. Just like how his Home Secretary Jaqui Smith has made us safer from terrorists by proposing legislation to record every sender and recipient of every phone call, email, instant message and webpage in the UK. Or, after it was thrown out of the Lords, she has repackaged the 42 day anti-terror detention plans.

We can trust them not to abuse it. Honest. Like how RIPA isn’t abused by local councils or how they don’t use anti-terror and serious crime statute to seize Icelandic bank’s assets. No sirree, they won’t abuse it.

Where you need to monitor someone, including their communications, you go get a warrant. You put your evidence in front of an impartial 3rd party (a judge in this case) and request to gather more personal information that may help the investigation. That way it is open, transparent and not open to abuse.

You don’t dragnet everything, hoping to catch the criminals. As explanation for this “need”, Smith pointed out that technology has moved forward and the statute needs to catch up with it. What she seems to have completely missed is that technology is continually moving forward and will always outpace the law. This uberdatabase will not correctly detect and correlate Tor or Freenet traffic (simply, these two current pieces of technology obfuscate what you do on the net). All the database of connections will show is user A connected to user B, and the rest is lost.

The other argument floated was that Skype and other VoIP telephony was a massive intelligence blackhole that needed to be filled; considering that Skype’s encryption is non-trivial to break and therefore the conversation cannot be recorded; why is this “problem” being used as the overriding cause to implement this Orwellian legislation when it is demonstrably flawed?

Don’t worry citizen, object that our hard won personal liberties are being blatantly undermined and you are in league with the terrorists.