U.K. police seek to scan e-mails

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, DEC. 3. In what has been denounced as a `sinister' attack on individual privacy and an attempt to further expand the State's powers, Britain's intelligence services have demanded authority to tap every telephone call and every e-mail sent or received by any person living in the country. The entire area of inter-personal communication including websites would be open to police tapping.

The information would be kept alive for seven years in a government-run `data warehouse', and the ostensible justification is that this would help the intelligence and police check the increasing problem of cybercrime.

Revealing the frightening scenario, The Observer reported today that if the Government accepted the demand - and it was reported to be giving it `serious consideration' - then ``every telephone call made and received by a member of the public, all e-mails sent and received and every web page looked at would be recorded''. The police, it said, would be able to use `trawling' computer techniques to look through ``millions of telephone and e-mail records''.

The move has provoked widespread anger and described as a step towards creating a Big Brother state. One Conservative MP said that vast banks of information on every member of the public could ``easily slip into the world of Big Brother'', while human rights activists charged that this would compromise the privacy of millions of `innocent' people who would have their highly personal information accessed by government agencies.

Some officials are also reported to have expressed strong reservations. Even those who thought that the police needed more powers to cope with new technology-driven crimes thought that the proposal would give sweeping powers to the state at the cost of individual right to privacy. Bugging people's telephone calls was not the way to fight crime, they said.

The Observer called it a `scandalous proposal' pointing out that it did not provide any safeguards ``such as requiring the investigative authorities to apply to a court for the right to gain access to such information.''

The move, it said, amounted to recommending that ``the entire population should be assumed potentially guilty overturning the first principles of justice...''

There have been other angry voices demanding that the move be not encouraged.

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Section  : International
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