> But senior Tory David Davis said it was "incredibly intrusive" and would only "catch the innocent and incompetent".
I think this sums it up, this data will be of little help for stopping crime, but it would be of great help for corrupt officials to do evil not to mention the risks involved with storing this data.
"The only people who will avoid this are the actual criminals, because there are ways around this - you use an internet cafe, you hack into somebody's wi-fi, you use what's called proxy servers, and they are just the easy ways."
It's sad that it's shocking for a politician to be able to actually list ways that this sort of system can be worked around.
I'm also disappointed that the Lib Dem ministers are so easily placated by "warrants must be approved by the Home Office", and not a judge. This shows an unnerving readiness to erode the separation between legislature and the judiciary.
Given that another Conservative minister claimed, under oath, that he doesn't know what "quasi-judicial" means (he was appointed that exact role), I don't have much hope that the home secretary will apply legal advice before handing out warrants.
I'm not informed massively on the work-load that the home secretary is under but is it really a good idea to even expect that they have the time to do proper research and take advice into account when judging whether a warrant is worthy or not?
It seems an awful lot like catching someone in a hurry to get them to sign something because you don't want them to read it.
Officials have already shown that they are happy to overstep what regular people consider to be acceptable. And that was a generous line. People in the UK are on the whole accepting of privacy invasions.
Announcing this during the McPherson inquiry (where various people (including police officers) have shown they're happy to break criminal law to obtain, buy, and sell information) means they're going to have a hard time getting it passed.
Unfortunately those who probably would care are too busy consuming the noise of the numerous wars, inquiries, showbiz, celebrity dross, royal banality, Olympic bleugh and regurgitating it all over Facebook.
See the calm when ID cards were first proposed. Most people just didn't care. There were some vocal anti-ID card campaigns pointing out the real faults of the proposed scheme, but most people either didn't care or thought it was a good idea. (A lot of wingnut racists who thought (wrongly) that it'd sort out the illegal immigrant "problem".)
It was only as time went on and the costs increased and the benefits decreased that more people started being against the card. The death knell came when the government announced that each card would cost > £100.
See also the number of people who think that everyone should be on the Police DNA database; the number of people who'd volunteer to have their DNA on that database. It's only relatively recently that people have started campaigning to have data removed for people who haven't been convicted or charged of a crime.
There isn't much fuss around cctv cameras; or around automatic number plate recognition cameras; or around laws enforcing specific fonts to allow anpr cameras to work.
Your last sentence sums up the problem nicely: most people care more about X Factor than about privacy.
I think this sums it up, this data will be of little help for stopping crime, but it would be of great help for corrupt officials to do evil not to mention the risks involved with storing this data.