Yes, that’s right – it’s the government.
New proposals, found in the pages of that right wing rag ‘The Times‘ there was a piece on proposals by the state to watch us ever closer – on trying to find a paper [any paper] which also carried that story [but failing miserably] I found an ineresting piece in, I think, my usual right wing rag ‘The Daily Telegraph‘ where Google has taken a view as well… Why read a paper you agree with? You’ll only hear what you want to…
Whilst Google has decided it would like to record every webpage we visit, the british government is thinking hard about keeping every text, logging every phone call (mobile, landline or even routed through the internet), email and such for at least twelve months. It’s about the war on terror and not about making an incursion into our private lives…
And whilst thinking about the goverment the human fertilization and embryology bill has been making steady progress – yesterday the parts concerning making embryos from hybrids has been passed – purely for scientific progress. Most will probably be for inserting human DNA into an egg from something else – cow, pig, whatever, maybe a politician (99.9% human). However it also permits half and half or any other ratio you care to think about – these things are going to be made so that they can be tested and then destroyed [probably by 14 days].
Whilst, right now, there’s a block on transplanting these into a womb of any animal that could also go back to the government – given that scientists will undoubtedly think that they will be able to learn even more from doing that in the, hmm, not so distant future… What will a seventy percent human hybrid do for us apart from not having any legal status and could then be carved up just like a fourteen day old embryo… Of course they won’t go that far…
Dawkins argued that genetically engineering crops was the same as farmers and horticulturists breeding certain crop strains over the years – however I would say there is a distinct difference between that and implanting fish genes into tomatoes so that they have a longer shelf life – but if that becomes the way of thinking about GM crops why not hybrids?
The question I think is important here is how we value ourselves as beings, and other animals, as what/who we/they are. Are we going to get to the point where a chimp/human hybrid is superior due to the higher strength to muscle ratio? And what would that make us? Or would we always look down on our strange creations – and what would that say about us?
Who are we and how important is that?
A pipe dream! The sheer amount of data this would have to hold makes it completely infeasible. Imagine how fast the data would grow!
The British Government seems to see technology as the answer to every problem.
Five years ago, maybe less, the space needed to keep all that data would have been prohibitive – but when you can have a 2 gigabit pen drive or 160 gig laptop – and given in the past whole rooms were used for telephone exchanges and in just one of those things you could store all this data…
It is no longer about whether or not it could be done but whether or not there is the political will and then the madness of the tendering process and failed systems and late delivery…
Just like the new NHS database and the up and coming ID database…
It should be about what kind of country do we want to live in and my answer to that is – not that one.
This is going far beyond security, this is ending our freedom. They wants us to be scared and that’s what they do with the idea and war against terrorism, so we want this services and find them save. But now I always use 0800 numbers
And part of the whole scheme would be to include even those numbers – so if it gets passed [and hopefully it’ll get stuck and then lost in the drafting stages] those numbers won’t make any difference.
Of course if it doesn’t get passed then there’s the side issue of ‘Why use those numbers?’
I’m not sure, it’s a nice idea but a non starter. I currently record all my telephone calls and even in compressed format they average 3mb per call. Say I make 10 a day on average – that is 840mb a month – 10gigs a year. Multiply that by 60 million and you get a shocking figure – 500 petabytes, about 500 times the size of the largest storage facility in the world, owned by Google. Of course that is just an example of the phone calls…….add to that encryption etc….
Besides what about the gathering and storing of this information? The telephone companies would need a network beside their network just to cope with all the data traffic of recording, storing and transmitting the data.
The cost of the storage facility alone would be in the £1trillion range. Add to that the infrastructure for obtaining the data. I don’t think this is something that we need to be concerned about, it is nonsense.
The Times, and I, used the word ‘log’ which might explain your disbelief – it’s not about recording them but knowing what phone phoned the other phone – texts and emails I think they might try to keep -that would be mad but not impossible.
It’s invasive beyond the realm of the state – we would be virtually living in a very low risk prison in which the wardens and the governors have to mix with the rest of the inmates….
By the by – my instinct is to publish almost any comment [truly a comment that is] – do you think ‘Morgan’s’ Spam? and by the way, Morgan you’d help if you said something of substance…
Sorry I misunderstood, I assumed they were going to be recording the actual calls. I don’t really understand what is being proposed then, surely they have access to all this information already? The phone companies certainly store this information, and frequently hand it over to the police. I am not sure about text messages but they are certainly logged if not stored complete.
As for emails, again easily and frequently accessed by the police, and it certainly isn’t hard to track down copies of emails that have been sent, each server makes a copy as it passes through.
I suppose the only real concern is why the Government feels the need to pass further legislation to access information that they can already access and worse, why they wish store all this information in one place.
Most worrying.
I think Morgan is genuine, if he were spam he’d have written something generic like:
I thought I had a fan when I got one like that until someone else posted word for word the same comment, but under a different name.
I remember (about a year ago or maybe more…) that mobile phone companies were required to keep logs of calls for at least a year when I think it was previously 6 months… and then, at an appropriate request they could hand the appropriate data over… to the appropriate folk…
Of course why bother with procedures to protect folk when you can just stick it in one place… so we can rest easy if this gets through in knowing that the appropriate people could go through this stuff in their spare time {not that that’s likely unless you attract their attention in their spare time – or maybe you have a strange name… but nevermind it’s to make the world a safer place….}
no iam not a spam. i just left my idea. but if you want to erase the link it’s up to you. you can also see in youtube the interview with Mos Def on Real Time show with 6 parts. i agree with him. maybe after it you will understand what i mean by: they create a terror that doesnt exist, so we get scared and then we agree with this database because we think we are being protected.
Sorry if I sounded a bit off, Morgan but thanks for getting back…
[I have been bitten in the same way that Charlie had…]
Yes – make the children scared and then they’ll hang on to the skirt ever tighter… it’s a sick form of government but that’s what we’ve got.
Of course when the Government is short of revenue and it is too near an election for a tax rise, they could also sell on all that data, which would probably be worth millions.
I (hopefully) don’t have to worry about anti-terror police using my information for catch me out or anything but I get enough junk mail and spam as it is.
Quite right, the same lies have been used over and over again and for the same reasons:
Yet time and again we fail to realise that the ones that we really need protecting from, are the ones claiming to be protecting us.
As an aside, as I can’t think of anything great to say, I’ve taken on board your comment about reading things you don’t necessarily agree with, and added a few new blogs to my reading list. Though now worried I might become ‘Outraged of London’ as a result! 😉
Pretty diverse post hence a diverse comment on my part.
Being on the other side of the pond as I am I’m curious about the thinking that the “Right” has some monopoly on liberty bashing. Over here people babble on about Hoover to the Patriot Act as if no liberal and/or Democrats ever had a hand in the mix. Don’t get me wrong I’m against Big Brother regardless of party affiliation.
GM,Eugenics,human engineering. Are these things that are truly coming ? I recall a Star Trek episode where the rights of beings were brought to fore due to their newly discovered “life rights”. It is indeed curious where science and attitudes may find us all sooner than later.
In a summary kind of way I’ll ask the following. How much are we anyway given all the parts of us we leave laying about ? In any given day we all either voluntarily or unknowingly leave data,dna, images and other bits & bytes all over the place. Think about it.
Well, yes it’s all coming… Some research regarding hybrids was put on hold to wait for the bill to become law so some labs will/are probably preparing some experiments to be the ‘first’ as soon as the bill becomes law…
Just as some background to the UK politics – the ‘Tories’ or members of the Conservative Party are small taxes small government and a slight helping of a libertine streak in some… The Labour party has become a winch to stalinism when it comes to ‘rights’ – ban on hunting, smoking, attempts to engineer a ‘continental’ drink attitude (eg cafes and intellectual debate – not the home grown pint, smoke and chatter) now possibilities are being aired about how to change our attitudes towards the armed services… The Labour party traditionally is on ‘The Left’ of politics but is now more right wing than the Liberal Democrats who, traditionally occupied the ground somewhere between Labour and the Tories but is now, probably the Left Wing party with a self confessed heavy streak of Liberty – of course as they haven’t been in power for getting on to half a century (if not getting on for a century) we don’t really know what the Liberal Democrats would really do regarding their liberal position given power…
We leave DNA, data et al all over the place and the people we come into contact with can spread this even further (including DNA as in skin cells from a handshake to another handshake…) That doesn’t mean we want someone to hoover all this stuff up and keep an eye on it.