The British government, acting on instructions from their masters in Federal Europe, have abolished our right to privacy.
Jacqui Smith, the new Home Secretary, signed a Statutory Instrument in July bringing an EU Durective into force requiring all phone records to be kept for at least one year and made available to various state agencies and even local authorities when requested.
The data collected and made available to anyone ranging from police officers and security services down to local council officers and doctors includes the numbers you call, how long you’ve been on the phone, the name and address of the person the number relates to and for mobile phones, the geographic location of the call.
Moblie phone companies can pinpoint your location, usually within a few feet, using triangulation. Triangulation involves looking at the signal strength from the transmitters that your phone is connected to and, factoring in geographic features, an accurate location for the phone can be calculated allowing mobile users to be tracked whether they are using their phones or not. People who write spy books aren’t making this stuff up, in a previous job I spoke to someone who dealt with the requests from the Police for phone tracking at Orange.
Plans are afoot to extend the legislation – again, without the involvement of the British Parliament – to cover emails and internet usage.
Every piece of “anti-terror” legislation that eminates from this shower of shits in Westminster brings us closer to the kind of society Orwell envisaged in 1984.
Draconian legislation it is but it isn’t infallible, the triangulation is very hit and miss,
in a perfect world it would work to the last foot however it is the stuff of james bond, unreal. Ships at sea used triangulation many years before GPS and a lot of shipping ended up on rocks, the vagaries of radio propagation defeat accuracy. Sure they can identify which town your in or which masts you are between but that’s about all, the rest is bluff, good for getting criminals to cough sometimes.The government system is like a crazed lumberjack who can’t see anything for the trees, so they chop them all down! when they have cleared all the trees they will know that there was nothing to see but a thing of great beauty has been lost and by clearing all before them they to will be exposed.
If phone calls are to be made there is always Skype or Voip where your ID can be hidden or just the old simple letter by post. The only people that tapping and bill details are going to catch are the petty criminals and the simple minded, a serious or proffesional criminal doesn’t say much to anyone through any media.