Is the Surveillance State being resurrected? Assessing whether privacy is protected when surveillance policy is developed.

Just published on Hawktalk: http://amberhawk.typepad.com/amberhawk/

April is becoming a month of resurrections. The last blog referred to the Members of an Information Rights Tribunal resurrecting the corpse of Durant which then bit them; they were thus turned into zombies and issued a Decision that I will politely call “provocative and novel”.

Last month Theresa May resurrected the data retention ambitions of GCHQ so that all contact details, dates and times of all electronic communications between all individuals in the UK are retained for a year or so and captured in real-time (the electronic communication can be in any format - email, social network, VOIP).

Now Francis Maude appears to have resurrected the data sharing ambitions of the previous Government, quoting Thomas Walport as justification. In a speech on 6th February, he said that he had established a Taskforce that “is committed to removing barriers to sharing information and it is prepared to recommend changes to legislation where there are unnecessary legal barriers”.

If interested follow the link