Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones

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.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

Whilst in France, I needed a SIM card. I went into a shop to buy one and the man behind the counter asked for my ID. I told him that I was not French and did not have one. He refused to sell me the SIM. I got my driver to present his ID and then I had my SIM card.

This and thousands of variations of it will ensure that anyone can get a SIM card without showing ID. All of you with a working brain cell know this.

This measure is nonsense, promoted by imbeciles and supported by imbeciles. Criminals can make phone calls today that are 100% untraceable where no one even knows that a phone call is taking place. By using Asterisk and some cheap equipment, you can have your own absolutely secure private phone network. See how it works here:

http://tinyurl.com/57588k

Anyone who tells you these pathetic measures are for security, or who trotts out the tired, “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” line is, like I say above, an imbecile. These measures cannot work for the stated purpose, are actually not designed for the stated purpose, (they are there to surveil the ordinary citizen and NOT criminals) and it is high time that we point blank refuse to obey anything that this totalitarian government orders, starting with the absurd and evil ID card.

Any business that requires state ID does not get my money or money from my business, full stop. This is our anti Police-State policy, and we strictly adhere to it. If everyone who is against all of this adopts this policy in their private and business lives then the police state they are trying to build will come to a crashing halt.

Furthermore, everyone knows that they can follow the physical location of any cellular telephone on the network. They can also create relationship diagrams of every phone and then infer whatever they like from that. Criminals will always be able to get a mobile phone to use for crime. This is a fact.

Can we now expect all public phones to be dismantled and taken away? After all, they are anonymous phones that any one, any TERRORIST can use to make TERRORIST phone calls.

What about land lines in hotels, bars pubs etc etc.

This makes so little sense….until you read that GCHQ has been given one BILLION pounds to put it all together. GCHC is not keeping this money; they are spending it with vendors who will sell them the servers, and every other bit of kit they need to make this bad magic happen.

This is about money, pure and simple. This is corruption writ large. That is the only explanation that makes sense, since the case for what they are proposing is bogus on its face.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Bollocks, Idiocracy, Insanity, NIR, Politricks, Someone Stupid Said, The Law.