UK: Passports Will Be Needed To Buy Mobile Phones
October 19th, 2008Via: Times:
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.
Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.
A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.
The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.
The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.
The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.
The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.
Does the UK have any sort of “anti-police-state” political organizations? In this country, we have the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, in addition to civil-libertarian organizations such as the ACLU and People for the American Way. Does anyone know how the UK Independence Party stands on the growing surveillance-society in that country?
Yes we do, but they are all pretty worthless IMHO. I wouldn’t bother with UKIP as they are a bunch of marginalised right wingers. Our Green Party is hamstrung with internal dissent about what it stands for. The irony is that the Liberal Democrat party in the UK is quite a far out ‘mainstream’ party – gets almost as many votes as Labour and Conservatives but due to our distorting ‘first past the post’ electoral system, the seats go disproportionately to Labour and Conservative even though the Lib Dems get similar voter support.
As a teacher in the mainstream education system, I teach the pupils to forget politics and to embrace change on an individual level. Change the world one person at a time. I teach texts like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, but love it when the pupils discover the Diggers, Enclosures Act, Magna Carta etc and start getting fired up. I throw in a few comments every now and then about permaculture being the most revolutionary and radical thing a person can do in modern society. Withdraw your money from circulation and deny the establishment more power. I show them my illustrated edition of John Seymour’s ‘Self Sufficiency’ and a few case studies of permaculture communities actually making it work.
I have to say that the kids think I’m crazy, but since the whole Recession / Depression thing has loomed large in the media, a lot of them are coming to me with questions about how business works, how to grow things, and what we pay taxes for. Some of them now read Cryptogon and a couple of other illuminating sites.
This mobile phone story is great for use in class – most of the youngest kids are genuinely shocked when I tell them what life was like before mobile phones! We debate these issues and write essays on them too, so this will get added to the sources we use for research.
One question – what’s to stop a passport holder buying several phones and selling them privately?
Righteous and groovy way to be a teacher, williamspd. 🙂
In answer to your question at the end there, I would imagine even more draconian laws that will ultimately backfire.