BBC News | UK | Spy plans 'threat to human rights'

Civil liberties campaigners have warned the government that granting police and secret services greater snooping powers would be a breach of human rights.

It has been reported that British intelligence services and the police are seeking powers to log all telephone calls, e-mails and internet traffic in the UK.

This would be an unbelievable development and a massive intrusion on privacy. Would the government countenance the mandatory 'steaming open of envelopes' and recording of all postal correspondence? Can you imagine the uproar that that would cause?

Perhaps the most incredulous aspect of this whole idea is that the blithering idiot - the deputy director general of NCIS, Roger Gaspar - who is responsible for the proposal estimates that a database to store all the information would cost about £3m to set up and £9m a year to run!! Unbelievable!!!

Regular readers may recall my mentioning Buchanan International. Looks like they have this sort of technology already and the people:

FT.com | People | Special

"How do we write a program that detects anything bad that's going on on the internet?" asked Stephen Whitelaw, former Glasgow University lecturer and chief executive of Buchanan International, a security software company based outside Glasgow.

...

These intellectual feats breed eccentrics. One Actis employee, Roy MacNaughton, a 21-year-old drop-out from Glasgow University and a gifted astrophysicist who was also a concert grade pianist at the age of 12, guards the database.

A second, a ruthless tracker of criminals known only as Stew, is unkempt, sleeps in the office overnight and pads about barefoot. "We found Stew in the PC section of a bookshop in Glasgow - the best place to find his sort," says Whitelaw. "The last thing I want is disciplined minds."

Good to know all this data is in safe hands then!! By my reckoning they'll get £1m each to set it up and £3m each per annum to not spend on socks and toiletries. BTW, if you're reading this Stephen, Roy and Stew it's nothing personal OK ;-)

Update: Out of curiosity I visited the Buchanan International website. [health warning: do not visit if you are susceptible to epilepsy - really]:

Coming soon...
In precisely 11 days, 18 hours, 6 minutes and 20 seconds we launch our exciting new website.
Until then you can view our existing temporary site by clicking here.

In a cunning ploy to throw off potential hackers and other ne'er-do-wells, the self-proclaimed monitors of the 'Dark Side of the Internet' have cleverly placed their welcome text and the 'here' link on a nice blue background thus rendering the link almost invisible. An even more cunning stunt was to make sure that that link to the existing temporary link [currently] throws up a 404 Not Found

Obviously these subtle ploys are to demonstrate to the politicians and security services that Buchanan International is at the forefront of website protection measures (specifically sprinkling \s into URLs), dark-force counter-measures, and anti-snooping techniques. After all, if visitors don't have an epileptic seizure and then actually manage to find the link they'll just get a 404 Not Found. Brilliant! Way to go BI!!

Perhaps In precisely 11 days, 17 hours, 37 minutes and 37 seconds [at the time of writing] they'll launch their exciting new website by just fixing the link ;-)

Finally, for the terminally curious the Buchanan International Newspage announces:

buchanan and system lookout map the dark side of the web