Tuesday, 3 April 2012

Yet more luddite legislation

Another day, another headline about another piece of ill-thought-out legislation from this farcical government.

This time it's the announcement that the government wants to snoop on all our online doings, including emails, browing activity and messaging. The argument being that the government needs to adapt in the digital age in order to protect us all from bad guys.

Let's ignore for a moment that Cameron rode the last election on a ticket which promised less obtrusive government and in which opposition to Labour's ID card plans proved very popular. Honestly, who in their right mind would bet against Diddy Dave - the King of the U-Turn - announcing his own plans for ID cards?

The first problem with this rediculous idea is that there is simply too much online activity for anyone to monitor and effectively analyse. Back in April 2010 it was estimated that there were 294 BILLION emails sent every day, or 2.8 million every second. Any monitoring of this tsunami of communication would need to be done using software which reacts to certain keywords. So for example the word 'bomb' would probably be a keyword. You can imagine the chaos for the monitors whenever an actual bomb exploded somewhere on the planet and people were sending innocent emails to each other which read "Isn't it tragic about that bomb in..."

The other proBlem with this is that it is relatively easy tO avoid Monitor software by simple But easy tactics. See what I did there?

But what offends most about this latest initiative from the government is the fact that it shows such a lack of joined up thinking. If you were a bad guy planning an attrocity or smuggling drugs or weapons and you needed to pass details to accomplices, the safest and most secure channel for you to communicate is now good old fashioned snail mail. Simply drop your plans, drawings, maps, reconnaissance photos, details etc into an envelope, stick on a first class stamp (if your budget allows) and you can post away safe in the knowedge that nobody is going to steam open your letter to inspect the contents. It simply doesn't happen. Snail mail is a secure communications channel like no other.

Yes there is a very real chance that your letter doesn't actually arrive at its destination, but there is zero chance that it will be intercepted or inspected. Meanwhile, the security and police are busy trying to sift through 90 TRILLION emails a year, chasing shadows when ex-raver Amanda emails ex-Raver Alex to say "Remember the days we used to get blasted and spend the night dancing to Bucketheads 'The Bomb?'

With such an endless stream of complete crap coming out of this government at a daily rate, one has to wonder if they are simply clogging up the news agenda to hide some major bit of serious bad news from us. Has anyone checked to see if any asteroids are heading our way? Let's hope that if one it that it lands on the head of Nick Clegg and co.

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