UK News UK Government to monitor social networking sites

[Cornface]

"We have no way of knowing whether Osama bin Laden is chatting to Abu Hamza on Facebook. Or terrorists could be having a four-way chat on Skype," he said.

Rofl, then they'll just start using Ventrilo.

 

[Darthfett]

Rofl, then they'll just start using Ventrilo.

Who's to say they'll even have to do that. They can just talk in "code". It's not even hard, and it'd probably avoid it easily.

 

[phyrex1an]

Where and when is true, but what I'm saying is that they don't look at your profiles on these sites for fun or privacy violation, which is what some people are worried about, for whatever reason.

As far as I know, anyone who is logged in to a social networking site is allowed to see your profile, unless you make it private - those are the people who can complain. If you have a public profile, anyone who visits the site can potentionally stumble upon it.

It is a privacy violation per definition, the only thing you can debate is the severity of the violation. Facebook profiles are private to friends only per default. I still don't see how you having a public profile justifies the government tracking your location when you use it.

Second thing I've noted here is that people seem to think that they'll just perform simple "search for bad words" stuff on the data. Reality is that they'll use the data to build datagrams of your social life, that's why they aren't that interested in the content but instead of the "who, when, where". The idea is that once you have the sociograms of all/many citizens in place you'll be able to define a "normal" and "innocent" behaviour from that. If a person doesn't match that behaviour then she is a suspect and will be put under extra surveillance.
The unfortunate side effect of these thing is that no matter how good accuracy you get into the system the low innocent to guilty ratio guaranties that innocent people will be put under extended surveillance more often that guilty people.

 

[Wiseman_2]

I want Blaire back over there, I liked him.

Once upon a time I would have called you insane, but Brown makes Blair look like Ghandi.

Also, this is an excessive waste of our money. We are in the middle of the worst economic crisis for decades and the government is willing to just throw our money at "solutions" that won't work and will simply be used to harvest the information of UK citizens.
http://www.no2id.net/!