The Coalition is to revive plans first raised then shelved by the last Labour Government to track the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet.
Proposed new powers, to be unveiled in the Queens Speech, will see a huge expansion in the amount of data communication providers are required to keep for at least a year.
It will allow the police and intelligence officers to monitor who someone is in contact with or websites they visit, although the content of such communications will not be accessed.
Civil liberty campaigners last night said the proposals were an unprecedented expansion of state intrusion more akin to China or Iran.
Labour faced fierce opposition in 2006 when it proposed creating a national database to store such information and later dropped all notion of the scheme just before the last general election.
But the new Government has revived the plans and while there will be no database, providers will be required to record all activities of their customers so they can be accessed if needed.
It comes even though the Coalition Agreement promised to "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason".
Ministers will argue it is essential to help combat terrorism and serious crime such as paedophile networks.
It raises the prospects of police or security agencies being able to monitor communications in real time on people they are investigating as well as trawling back through previous contacts.
Continued on Page 47
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
