The perfect scam: We will pay higher broadband bills so the government can spy on us
This is beyond the pale.
Not only is the government planning to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to spy on all their clients, but ministers are offering to provide only a fraction of the cost.
This means the vast majority of the financial burden will fall on Internet users. Our broadband bills will increase – possibly pricing many of us out of the market.
Those who are left will be paying for the government to spy on them. It is perhaps the greatest insult that a government can inflict upon its internet-using citizens.
Worse still, if the cost of broadband increases, there will be no guarantee that the terrorists the Snoopers’ Charter – sorry, the Investigatory Powers Bill – are intended to catch will even use the internet after the new prices have been set.
This legislation is expensive, insulting and pointless – much like the government.
Consumers’ broadband bills will have to go up if the investigatory powers bill is passed due to the “massive cost” of implementation, MPs have been warned.
Internet service providers (ISP) told a Commons select committee that the legislation, commonly known as the snooper’s charter, does not properly acknowledge the “sheer quantity” of data generated by a typical internet user, nor the basic difficulty of distinguishing between content and metadata.
As a result, the cost of implementing plans to make ISPs store communications data for up to 12 months are likely to be far in excess of the £175m the government has budgeted for the task, said Matthew Hare, the chief executive of ISP Gigaclear.
Hare and James Blessing, the chair of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA), also warned the science and technology committee on Tuesday of the technical challenges the government would face in implementing the bill.
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As and when that begins it may be worth giving the broadband a wide girth.
Scameron !
Saw this coming, how else are they going to pay for it.
They aren’t going to, just like everything else.
Why can’t this government just target the group behind most of the terrorism ? Or stop all those wars abroad?
The Snooper Charter is not for Terrorism, its to measure the disent of the people and arrest them if they are going to try and start some thing that could force the government out of power, They don’t want to see what happen in Portugal happen here.
Many of the contact points between us and Govt. (including LAs) are becoming accessible by internet only. Indeed for those unwaged & on benefits it is imperative to have broadband and phones. Once again, the cost of this massive data collection will fall most heavily on those who can least afford it. Why are we not surprised, indeed.
How come the government can force ISPs, private companies, to do their bidding? Surely we are used to hearing “that’s a private company so we have no control over their actions” when it comes to employers and pay, utility costs etc.
Time to go back to the good old fashioned typewriter.