Communications Data Bill dropped from Queens Speech

Yesterday’s Queens speech was notable for its omission of the Communications Data bill, the extremely controversial Big-Brother-esque piece of legislation which received a huge amount of opposition in the UK and against which a number of blogs, including this one, have opposed.

Another public consultation on the bill will take place early next year and will aim to discuss problems the government sees in our national security, and proposed ways to tackle these problems.

Back in October, Jacqui Smith “clarified” what the Bill would and would not do:

“There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your e-mails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online. Nor are we going to give local authorities the power to trawl through such a database in the interest of investigating lower-level criminality under the spurious cover of counter-terrorist legislation.” (quote from ComputerWeekly.com)

RESIST Big Brother Britain!

In the few days, the UK Government has published its plans to collect more data on people’s phone, e-mail and web-browsing habits under the generic umbrella of measures to fight global terrorism.

This will be included in the innocuously sounding ”Communications Data Bill”, due to be introduced in the Queen’s Speech in November.

We do not oppose the fight against global terrorism. But we don’t want to have constant police presence everywhere in my house.

Frankly, many people are outraged by this further intrusion into our civil liberties. A growing number of people want oppose the increasing Big Brother intervention of the present government. Alongside many bloggers, I am voicing my opposition to plans for further spying on our affairs and private lives.

The general sentiments are very well expressed and illustrated in the following post by the Power to the People website and I thank the author for allowing (in fact positively encouraging) the article to be reprinted here, something I would not do normally: Link to article.

As many will be aware, Britain already has the highest amount of surveillance cameras watching over its citizens. City dwellers are typically filmed dozens of times per day – something that has not actually reduced violent crime statistics under the present government! We seem to be heading for – if not there already – a police state. And this is scary, because once a government acquires certain powers, it does not typically ever give them up. So there will unlikely be a relaxation on the current policing techniques employed. And I am not sure police can even use their newly acquired powers to get us the degree of protection they claim they will offer.

The initiative to indicate our common outrage at this most recent government measure has in fact come from a blog at shrewdmammal.com – the author is urging people to include the tag ‘RESIST‘ in all like minded posts and has included a logo which I have included on the front of my own blog.

If you share our views, and think the government is beginning to enjoy too much intrusive power over Britain, please feel free to reprint this article in your own blog.

Thank you.