With two reports expected on the Draft Communication Bill over the next few days we can expect to see lots of politicking from those who are for and against the bill. It seems Theresa May has got in early via an interview with The Sun, where she makes no qualms about what she thinks of those questioning or plainly opposing the bill.
"Anybody who is against this bill is putting politics before people’s lives. We would certainly see criminals going free as a result of this. There will be paedophiles who will not be identified and it will reduce our ability to deal with this serious organised crime."
Home Secretary Theresa May speaking to The Sun
The bill aims to make the major communication providers in the UK retain information for a minimum of 12 months that is best summarised as:
The Bill seeks to ensure that providers retain IP logs and other weblogs for a 12 month period, and reading evidence it appears in many cases providers are not keeping data to a sufficient standard, which as a side effect backs up people who complain about things like copyright infringement letters and are claiming to have never used a torrent type tool. Of course keeping weblogs that are the complete http header, with post and get parameters would expose a wealth of information, but as we understand things it is likely to just be the url up to the first /.
By and large people are not worried about groups like MI5 and the MI6, or the new National Crime Agency having access, but most worries arise due to feature creep and the possibility that many other arms of the government, both national or local may make a case for gaining access.
That line of argument by Theresa May was used very effectively by Herman Goering of the Nazi Regime in the 1930's and again by Tony Blair et al in the 1990's and its all a pack of lies, deciept and sleight of hand, it sets the same tone as a very nasty regime in East Germany know as the Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit aka the Stasi where they spied on, imprisoned, tortured and killed their own people!