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Big Brother Watch in Parliament

This afternoon Big Brother Watch director Nick Pickles gave evidence to the Joint Committee on the draft Communications Data Bill.

You can now watch the session online here.

During the session Nick revealed that a Big Brother Freedom of Information Act request exposed how Kent Police internally rejected 3237 requests for communications data in the past three years, nearly 30% of the total number of applications made by officers.

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in CCDP, Civil Liberties, Communications Data Bill, Information Commissioner, Internet freedom, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology
  • nooprivacyhere Guv

    Very interesting and useful to note all the issues raised – they cannot say in the future that these issues were not formally raised. I found some of the questions being asked of the witnesses concerning – especially those about wanting to reduce or not have at all, the process of needing to get a court order or warrant in order to access an individual’s data. Taking away this important step would simply give those who cannot resist taking a peek, carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with our data. Until such times as the Data Protection Act is much more robust and much more rigorously and effectively policed the government should not even consider something that takes away more of our freedom and privacy. Actually, they should not consider such a step, period.

    This Bill, if it goes through, will pretty much put the finishing touches to the Big Brother Society that we now live in. We have so little privacy now and the government wants us to give up what little privacy we have left – and our government has the cheek to criticise other countries for the way they monitor their people. If existing national institutions/organisations cannot be trusted with the data they already have about us then we certainly could not trust them with even more data. The concept of ‘we have the ability to do it’ means that ‘we should do it’ is totally and utterly false. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.