maandag 15 januari 2007

Big Brother 18


De geschiedenis toont aan dat sociaal democraten alles via de staat organiseren. De Independent bericht:
'Big Brother: What it really means in Britain today.
By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
Published: 15 January 2007

Moves to share people's personal details across Whitehall have provoked a civil liberties uproar and accusations that the Government has taken another step towards "a Big Brother state".
Ministers say the scheme - which will be endorsed by Tony Blair today - is aimed at improving public service delivery. But it faced protests that it was dealing another blow to personal privacy by creating a "snooper's charter" and enabling thousands of civil servants to access sensitive information with ease.
Two months ago Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, warned that Britain was "waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us". But ministers dismiss such fears and are pressing ahead with the world's most ambitious identity scheme, as well as a rapid expansion of the DNA database. Details of all children will be held in a single register to be launched next year, medical records are being transferred to a central NHS database and plans are being examined to track motorists' movements by satellite.
The idea of sharing personal details between departments follows a review of public services designed to make them more efficient. Ministers reached the conclusion that data protection rules limiting access to information about adults were too tight.
John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, cited an incident yesterday where a bereaved family were contacted 44 times in a six-month period by different parts of his department to confirm details of an accident. Mr Hutton said: "The Government already stores vast amounts of data about individual citizens, but actually doesn't share it terribly intelligently. There is room for improvement."
The Government intends to legislate later this year to ease the curbs on data-sharing between departments. It is also refusing to rule out the idea of a single "super-database", where everything from benefits and pensions records to information on motorists and TV licence payments are stored. More details are expected to be announced by the Prime Minister today.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: "This is an accumulation of our Government's contempt for our privacy. This half-baked proposal would allow an information free-for-all within government - ripe for disastrous errors and ripe for corruption and fraud."'

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