The Guardian has a front page report updating the status of the Government's proposals to monitor all UK communications (the "Interception Modernisation Programme" or IMP). This the proposal to record the names and addresses of all communications, but not (at this stage) the contents of the communications. This execrable plan is estimated to run in at about £12 billion, a sum which you would think the Government would quail at, in the present financial circumstances.
Bizarrely, considering the database is supposed to be vital for national security, one proposal is that it be run by private industry. Apparently this is under the illusion that privatised work will be more cost-effective than that run by Govenment. Ho hum.
The Guardian's article quotes Sir Ken Macdonald, the former DPP, who is appropriately critical of the whole endeavour.
[He] told the Guardian such assurances would prove worthless in the long run and warned it would prove a "hellhouse" of personal private information.
"Authorisations for access might be written into statute. The most senior ministers and officials might be designated as scrutineers. But none of this means anything," said Macdonald. "All history tells us that reassurances like these are worthless in the long run. In the first security crisis the locks would loosen."
The other thing that would happen in a crisis is that all assurances that the content of communications will not be stored will go straight out of the window. I had understood that one element in the development of the IMP was a directive from Europe. Macdonald goes on to say
Maintaining the capacity to intercept suspicious communications was critical in an increasingly complex world, he said. "It is a process which can save lives and bring criminals to justice. But no other country is considering such a drastic step. This database would be an unimaginable hell-house of personal private information," he said. "It would be a complete readout of every citizen's life in the most intimate and demeaning detail. No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls."
Well, that sounds as though this is a purely UK-driven initiative. Of course we all trust the Government and any private lackeys to look after all those data, don't we...well you might like to check out what the Open Rights Group have to say.