Monday, April 27, 2009

Pull The Other One, It's Got Emails On It

Pangloss's fevered response to just watching Jacqui Smith on BBC News at Ten:

Yeh, Jacqui Smith, you're not creating the giant super-database of all our calls, emails, IMs, Twitters etc, all in one place run by the state AFTER ALL because you respect our privacy so much. Riiight.

And it's got nothing at all to do with being told repeatedly that (a) data mining across that huge pile of material is so inaccurate the results are not remotely worth the costs and can't anyway be used in court (b) the costs of the super-database were going to be super enormous at a time when the country is nosediving into bankruptcy (a former Government minister told me point blank, some months ago, that the government simply didn't have the money for this) and (c) the chances of a giant super-data breach from this single-point-of-failure multiple-authorised-access super-database - which would make the HMRC data breach look like a drop in an ocean of , er, excrement - were higher than the odds-on chances of the Tories winning the next election.

Yehhh. Right.

Alternately JC has woken up and smelt the roses of privacy after her own and her hubbie's little recent pecadillos were exposed by the press. But mostly, yeh, right.

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