Legal Research

True Or False: George Orwell Was Born In England?

False — it was India.

But he was English.  And today the English government is starting to look more and more like the Big Brother regime Orwell envisioned in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.   The NY Times reports that the government is considering the creation of a giant database containing Internet, email and telephone traffic in the UK.  It would store all the phone numbers that were dialed, every Web site people visited, and each email address to which messages were sent.

All in the name of fighting terrorism.

That would be one ginormous database.  All that lovely information swept up into one place.  Given the UK government’s track record for information security, it would be a nice, fat target for hackers.  But the UK government doesn’t want people to worry about privacy: “Officials emphasized that such a database would not store the content of phone calls or e-mail messages.”

Oh, well in that case, carry on.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on October 16, 2008 (boomark / email).