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Will legislation passed in England to monitor and record all phone calls and emails be coming to America?
Under new legislation, internet companies will be instructed to install hardware enabling GCHQ – the Government’s electronic “listening” agency – to examine “on demand” any phone call made, text message and email sent, and website accessed.
Or is this already in place in the United States? Data collection agencies already exist here and more are being built. The newest facility for the NSA is in Utah:
Here’s some of the data center’s purpose:
Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
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According to Binney [Former senior NSA “crypto-matematician” ], one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.
Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.”
Here is a checklist of attributes that made our nation strong:
- The land of the free
- The rule of law was integral to our Republic
- People were presumed to be innocent until proven guilty
- Limited government serving the people
- Freedom of speech
- Freedom of religion in a Christian nation
New powers to record every phone call and email makes surveillance ’60m times worse’
The former Conservative Home Secretary argued the new powers risked causing enormous resentment by allowing “unfettered” access to all forms of communication.
The Coalition is to revive plans first raised then shelved by the last Labour Government to track the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet.
The proposals, to be unveiled in the Queen’s Speech, will see a huge expansion in the amount of data communication providers are required to keep for at least a year.
It will allow the police and intelligence officers to monitor who someone is in contact with or websites they visit, although the content of such communications will not be accessed.
Mr Davis said: “What this does is make (existing problems) 60 million times worse. The simple truth is that this is not necessary. What’s proposed here is completely unfettered access to every single communication you make.
“It’s a very, very big widening of powers which will be very much resented by many citizens who do not like the idea. It’s going to cause enormous resentment.
Civil liberty campaigners last night said the proposals were an “unprecedented” expansion of state intrusion more akin to China or Iran.
Labour faced fierce opposition in 2006 when it proposed creating a national database to store such information and later dropped all notion of the scheme just before the last general election.
But the new Government has revived the plans and while there will be no database, providers will be required to record all activities of their customers so they can be accessed if needed.
It comes even though the Coalition Agreement promised to “end the storage of internet and email records without good reason”.
Ministers will argue it is essential to help combat terrorism and serious crime such as paedophile networks.
It raises the prospects of police or security agencies being able to monitor communications in real time on people they are investigating as well as trawling back through previous contacts.
Under new legislation, internet companies will be instructed to install hardware enabling GCHQ – the Government’s electronic “listening” agency – to examine “on demand” any phone call made, text message and email sent, and website accessed.
