http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22891845

But you won't be one step ahead you oblivious [LIFTED]. The security agencies have had the capability to listen, watch and track targets for decades and have done so, but this gives them an ability to monitor absolutely anyone, suspicious or not. These are the agencies who help install dictators, lose unencrypted data, have spent decades at various levels and organisations working alongside Team Murdoch (especially when it comes to cover-ups and propaganda), participate in and enable torture and abduction... Why should anyone lessen their privacy for scum like that, or the politicians who give it the OK?

And the cheek of trying to use corporations as a bogeyman - just who the hell has been 'championing' their rights?

I'll be interested to see these formal bills if they happen...

Clearly learned nothing from the Prism scandal.

they are try to bring in a version of the US 'patriotic' act by the back door

freedom and liberty for all, as long as you comply ...

When both sides of any debate are accusing each other of exactly the same crime, that is a good indicator of a conceptual error in the framing of the debate itself. In this case each side is accusing the other of unfounded fear mongering.

The problem is one of putting the cart before the horse. Communications monitoring is only one type of data among countless other sets. And law enforcement in general, let alone counter terrorism in particular, only one among many uses the state can have for rooting through your data.

At the moment state agencies are treating it all as a smorgasbord of delicious juicies with the tax man wanting one set, the health service another, and the spooks and the cops elbowing their own way to the trough. That's a messy response to the modern phenomenon of massively distributed data availability.

In each case there is a privacy concern that's valid because each of these data is open to misuse. There is a separate concern that maintaining that privacy is squandering an opportunity to achieve a public good. And then there is the technical inefficiency of having every government agency hoarding its own data sets and either sharing or withholding them from other agencies (private, academic and public) according to its own opaque rules.

I would argue that the correct starting point is a new technocratic agency to stand between the organs of state and all of the data they want. Somebody whose specific function is to decide which departments can know my data, and what questions they can answer with it.

If MI5 wants to lookup all the people who have had email contact with a certain person, and cross reference that against sales of bleach and fertiliser, there's some sense in letting them have that information. But I'm not happy with them having all the data in the universe and rooting through it for whatever they fancy.

We aren't anywhere near the end of this sort of issue. If we start with mutually uncomprehending world views - reactionary dystopian alarmism versus equally reactionary knee-jerk authoritarianism - both sides of the debate will simply ossify.