Big Sister is watching you!

The government's wonderfully worded Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) will make available our emails to any public body which makes a lawful request for them. From March all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will by law have to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for a year. On BBC Breakfast News this was discussed. Some naive emailer responded with the classic "if you haven't done anything illegal what have you to hide" line. But this is stupidy of the first degree.

As the Earl of Northesk, a Conservative peer on the House of Lords science and technology committee, says "This degree of storage is equivalent to having access to every second, every minute, every hour of your life. People have to worry about the scale, the virtuality of your life being exposed to about 500 public authorities". He is very right. This is not about some avunculur schoolmaster looking out for his pupils, or a priest taking in information of a sensitive nature and not revealing it to third parties. This is about simple data with not a lot of clarity (no content will be revealed, yet!) being washed around Whitehall for transient ministers and contract staff in government agencies to wade through. What exactly they will make of it I do not know.

Emails can be sent to anybody. Are we to ask about the moral fibre of every recipient of the emails we send out? I'm waiting for the knock on the door because some person the police or security service is interviewing has me on their email list. It's absurd nonsense. This will tell them nothing. I suspect it is more about securing data for their own purposes. It will waste time weeding out all the people who "haven't done anything illegal so haven't anything to hide".

The Earl of Northesk also says "Under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, privacy is a fundamental right... it is important to protect the principle of privacy because once you've lost it, it's very difficult to recover." Hear, hear to that!