Big Brother has arrived in Britain?

I just read an alarming article on the acquistion of surveillance abilities within the UK government into the lives of public citizens.

The Act, which has been quietly amended several times (each time handing more powers to the public sector), now gives an unprecedented range of state agencies the right to listen to our phone conversations, tap our emails and open our post.

In the last nine months of 2006, 960 new applications for the right to peer into the private lives of Britons were made every day.

It is a level of Government surveillance that would make even the Stasi, the former East German secret police renowned as the world's most effective intelligence agency, proud.

There are three types of survelliance listed: interception of communications, old-fashioned spying and access to communications data.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) initially only covered the nine most crucial law enforcement agencies (police, the taxman, the intelligence agencies etc).

But this merely delayed the stealthy march of Big Brother. In 2004, the number of groups with the right to poke in our lives expanded to 792; the laws to allow this had been slipped quietly through the Commons by David Blunkett.

As usual, Whitehall got its way by waiting for the fuss to die down. Incidentally, the only group with an exemption from being bugged are MPs themselves.


But the Act didn't merely extend the rights of bureaucrats to check on us, it also forced the larger internet service providers to build into their systems the technological capability to cater for all this snooping.

to see full article, go to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=511210&in_page_id=1770