A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials.
The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.
The proposal will raise further alarm about a “Big Brother” society, as it follows plans for vast databases for the ID cards scheme and NHS patients. There will also be concern about the ability of the Government to manage a system holding billions of records. About 57 billion text messages were sent in Britain last year, while an estimated 3 billion e-mails are sent every day.
Do we really send 3 billion e-mails every day? An average of about 50 per person per day? If this is true, we are sending more than 1000 billion per year (that is 1,000,000,000,000).
I appreciate that there are some clever people at GCHQ but even the most sophisticated word recognition technology would have trouble in managing a database of that size, especially when you consider that it would need to hold details of the ISP, the sender, the recipients, the date of sending and presumably the title of each e-mail. And that's before you get to the phone calls and text messages.
I just cannot see it ever happening.
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