Ireland to Begin Total Internet Monitoring and Surveillance

Not to be outdone by England, the land that preserved Christianity from the barbarians has come to this.  From the Independent:

In a state of surveillance

We are about to enter into a state where every digital step you take is recorded. At the end of March, the Government will introduce the most draconian law in the history of personal privacy in Ireland: 24-hour internet monitoring. A log will be made of everyone’s internet activity and every email sent and received. Greetings from the State of surveillance.

By Marie Boran
Thursday February 28 2008

By the end of March 2008, the Irish Government will begin mass digital surveillance, noting when we log on and log off the internet, as well as every email we send and who we send it to. We have entered into a new democratic state where our entire digital footprint is recorded and stored for up to two years by our internet service providers (ISPs).

Legal professionals suggest the move equates to the mass digital surveillance of the entire people of Ireland and may leave the Government to weather a brewing legal storm over the issues of human rights and privacy.

The Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act 2005 implies that personal data would only ever be accessed in the situation of fighting terrorist offences.

But this is not the case: presently your stored telecommunications data may be accessed in the investigation of any crime, be it serious or trivial, in relation to a terrorist offence or not at all.

So what is the worst that can happen? Death, according to the personal weblog of law lecturer and chair of civil rights group Digital Rights Ireland, TJ McIntyre. He was referring to the case of a pensioner in the UK who died following a heart attack after a brick was thrown through the window of his house by an irate driver who felt he had taken her parking space at the local supermarket.

How did this woman track down the elderly man? Her boyfriend called in a favour from a policeman friend who provided the man’s home address after running his registration plate through the system.

Granted, this example is extreme, but even the ‘mildest’ outcome of this surveillance still means a massive storage headache for the Irish IT industry. A more severe case is a damaging security breach and public information leak. We have seen recent cases both in Ireland and the UK where breach of private data has ranged from criminal to accidental with far-reaching implications.