Stand Up And Be Counted - Communications Data Bill

We are all now seeing what happens when capital, business and trade become global. When things go wrong, the whole world suffers.

The internet has permitted us all to know what is going on in the world, to see the viewpoints and lives of other, ordinary people like us, to hold out the hand of friendship and to gain a perspecive on events hitherto denied us, when news was handed down from above like a parent handing a gift to a child.

The problem is that the internet has become too free too quickly. It has created a world which politicians do not understand and of which they live in constant, fretful fear.

The idea that there is something in the world which is so anarchic, so amorphous that it cannot be controlled is the biggest threat to the power of the global state.

So, something has to be done to break the back of the internet and put this new freedom of ordinary people back in the box.

The Home Secretary of Britain's New Labour government is hoping to put through legislation in the form of the Communications Data Bill, which will mean that all email traffic, all websites visited, every telephone call made and every text message sent by anyone will be stored on a massive database - forever.

This government has a lamentable record on the safekeeping of the data it holds. Government departments regularly lose data on thousands of people, along with the computers and memory sticks on which this information is held.

In one case, they lost the unencrypted data of half the country - 25 million people - on one disk.

The govenment is also happy to sell your data to commercial operations around the world for money, without your knowledge or consent.

Even so, they are attempting to extend this to storing trillions of bits of information about us, as we go about our innocent daily lives. They want you to know that whatever you do, Big Brother is looking over your shoulder, waching you and breathing down your neck as you telephone your mother or surf the net for news.

If this passes into law in Britain, it will be followed by every country in Europe and, after that, with worse, more repressive and more incomptent laws and technologies across the world.

It has to be stopped before it is too late and you become too scared to visit a site like this.

The Communications Data Bill is, depending upon your perspective, probably the most perfidious piece of legislation to be attempted by any government on a free country or the last bastion and safeguard against the terrorist hordes who will blow us all to oblivion, given less than half a chance.

There is nothing neutral or insipid about its intentions and our responses should be neither vanilla nor subdued.

One line of thought might run as follows:

The insidious creep of the state’s intentional and malicious infringement and crippling of our civil liberties must be stopped before it is too late.

Nobody is going to fight this battle for you. You have to do it for yourselves.

You have to organise and group together and understand that in this regard, other people are your friends and fellow saviours and the state will always happily sell you down the river.

The state will never stop encroaching on and hobbling your freedoms until they control you completely through a mixture of fear and technology.

Remember the feeling in the early days that the internet was setting you free?

Do you want it now to entrap and snare you? Do you want the net to close around you like a noose, the web to tangle you like a stickily caught fly?

This legislation is nothing to do with facilitating the fight against crime and terrorism.

It is all about control and the state showing just how much it can terrorise the people.

Once you live in fear of the state looking over your shoulder evey time you log on or visit a website or send a text or email or just use the telephone, it will be too late.

If you want to save your freedoms, you have to act now and not only ensure that this pernicious and insidious legislation is never allowed to come to fruition, but that it is publicly defeated with such utter humilation that no government in Britain ever again attempts to cut the freedoms of the people off at the knees in the way that this New Labour administration is hoping to achieve through this morally bankrupt and repugnant bill.

Of course, another argument could run as follows:

We have to remove the freedoms of the people, accumulated with grim determination through centuries of varying degrees of oppression, and instil fear in everyone from the cradle to the grave in order that in the unlikely event that one criminal could not be caught through other, conventional and proven means, he is never allowed to slip free.

Everyone must be forced to pay the price of having their freedoms removed in order to ensure that a few criminals or terrorists who might, unkown to us, be free are made to share that same elimination of freedom.

If we metaphorically jail everyone, we must have caught the criminals in the same net which contains everyone else.

Alternatively, you can stand up and be counted and raise your voices into a collective howl, a roar of protest and keep the internet - and your lives - free from being owned and bartered like chattels by your governments.

http://communicationsdatabill.info/blogs/

Author: wuhudo at gmail dot com