Intercept Modernization Programme

This programme is an example of what’s happening all over the world – the Intercept Modernisation programme sounds fairly innocuous but it’s not, far from it. The latest plans under this UK programme involve installing a little black box in each and every telephone exchange in the United Kingdom.

These boxes will then copy all the phone and web data passing through them and copy the data up to a central database. So that’s a personal record of every single web site you visit and every email you send stored in this database. So what do you think of that ?

Intercept Modernisation Programme is the biggest threat to civil liberties in the UK for a very long time. The Home Office in the United Kingdom doesn’t have the greatest record of looking after this data for a start. And can you imagine what all this data is going to be used for ?

The default position in most of the world is bad enough – even in western countries the police , security agencies and various other factions routinely access the records from ISPs and telephone companies and use them in prosecutions. A central database that is used to routinely spy on ordinary people is extremely worryingly and of course I’m sure they’ll catch thousands of terrorists using this database.

I’m just glad that there are companies who provide services like Identity Cloaker – I use it primarily as a protection against Identity thieves and hackers (and to be able to surf from another country when required – to access Pandora when I’m in the UK for example) but it looks like stopping the government spying on me is an added benefit.

For UK citizens watch out over the next few weeks – a consultation paper is due out on IMP it will have great ramifications on our privacy and freedom of speech!