Open Rights Group - Petition against the renewal of the Interception Modernisation Programme

The Open Rights Group has a Petition for you to sign, however, we strongly suggest using an Open Proxy or Tor etc. to hide your real IP address.when you sign this petition online.

The government has announced that it will be spending up to £2 billion into new ways to snoop on email and web traffic. This Kafka-esque "Intercept Modernisation Plan", was stopped near the end of the last government, but was quietly revived in the 2010 Spending Review (read more here). While billions of pounds are being slashed from education, welfare and defence, the government plans to waste vast sums trying to snoop on our emails and Facebook communications. We need to tell the government to stop this wasteful, intrusive plan for wholesale snooping on our daily lives. 7281 people have signed so far Please sign our petition - and tell your friends Dear David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Theresa May, I do not want the government to try to intercept every UK email, facebook account and online communication. It would be pointless - as it will be easy for criminals to encrypt and evade - and expensive, costing everyone £2 billion. It would also be illegal: mass surveillance would be a breach of our fundamental right to privacy. Please cancel the Intercept Modernisation Plan.

Be very clear, Spy Blog believes that any low level public servant, or their senior Sir Humphrey Appleby / Yes Minister masters, whether they are in the Police or in the Intelligence Agencies ,should be prosecuted for Misfeasance in Public Office if they fail to investigate actual terrorist or serious organised criminal gangs or conspiracies.

We fully support narrowly targeted Interception and Data Preservation (NOT mandatory Data Retention)) aimed at terrorists, spies and serious organised criminal gangs.

However, if such bureaucrats dare to promote the re-introduction of the evil Labour government's wasteful Interception Modernisatrion Programme<, they should be named and shamed and ridiculed and sacked, for wasting public money in harsh economic times.

We totally reject as unworkable, counter-productive and liable to actually help recruit terrorists etc., any attempt at Mass Surveillance or Mass Telecommunications Traffic Data Retention and / or Analysis, especially if this is done in secret.

We had thought that disgraced former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's weasel worded "Interception Modernisation Programme" had been abandoned by the Whitehall apparatchiki as unworkable (as everyone with any real world internet or mobile phone technical knowledge or experience told them) , but, it seems that the Conservative / Liberal Democrat Coalition government has been tricked and bamboozled into reviving this "zombie" policy, under the aegis of the National Security Strategy.

The ORG petition only highlights "government snooping on every email and Facebook message and web chat", but the reality of a re-introduction of the IMP pipe dream would be far more extensive and far more intrusive than this, including Mobile Phone Cell based Location Data to physically track the movements of you or your children in near real time, without any "reasonable suspicion" that you were actually involved in a Serious Crime (defined by the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act 2000, section 81 General Interpretation, subsection (3) (a) , as one which a first time offender, might expect a Prison Sentence of 3 years or more - typically drug smuggling or terrorism etc.)

a) that the offence or one of the offences that is or would be constituted by the conduct is an offence for which a person who has attained the age of twenty-one (eighteen in relation to England and Wales] and has no previous convictions could reasonably be expected to be sentenced to imprisonment for a term of three years or more;



Needless to say it would mostly be innocent people. or knuckle dragging stupid criminals, who could be easily caught by other means, who would be the targets of such a scheme. Any competent professional criminals, foreign intelligence agents (spies) or sophisticated terrorists would easily avoid it.

We have bot seen any evidence to dissuade us from the view that any such IMP scheme would be open to widespread abuse for political or personal reasons, or that vast amounts of the data would not be lost or handed over in bulk to insecure foreign governments, without any mechanisms for error correction and financial compensation for the inevitable cock ups and gross errors.

In the worst cases, too many innocent people's lives will be put in physical danger or their family lives and career prospects will be ruined, as a result of futile, inaccurate, automated false positive / false negative attempts at "data mining" in secret.

There is also the very real danger that such a database will be abused for purely political reasons, to help snoop on, or harass innocent political opponents of the current or future government.

Do not think that simply signing this online petition is enough.

Please also lobby your Members of Parliament or other elected representatives (in Westminster or in Scotland or Northern Ireland ore Wales or in Europe) - contact them via WriteToThem.com