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    Live with it! We're the most watched nation on earth as it is. I hate to think how many CCTV cameras watch my daily travels - and that's just on the motorways! Looking at the Traffic England web site it shows 29 separate cameras between Folkestone and the M26 alone and I pass every single one of them twice a day during the week. That doesn't include the ANPR and speed cameras either. The M25 must be the most watched motorway in the country - and I'm not about to count all those cameras. In part I actually rely on these cameras to warn me of possible delays (yesterday's closure of the M26 for example - I knew it had re-opened before I left home despite radio reports to the contrary).

    Our mail is tracked too. The automated letter sorting machines read the destination address and I'm pretty sure that the data accumulated from that simple process is watched by a computer somewhere. Parcels and packets are scanned and x-rayed - especially if they're heading for an airport. You'd be amazed at some of the things I've transported over the years that have been rejected as "prohibited items" - yesterday it was a gun apparently!!

    When it comes to communications we have to accept that electronic web-based communications will be monitored. At a human level this is going to be impossible (how many emails can you read a day?) and even the fastest super-computers would be swamped. HMG would have to rely on the ISPs recording and storing all this data and even they don't have the capacity to keep everything beyond a month or so. And what about if your ISP isn't located in the UK? The best the intelligence services can hope for is to be able to pick out certain keywords and phrases in plain text from emails and other text-based methods (such as this forum) and chat rooms etc. Encryption technology is publicly available and, though not impossible to crack, takes time and resources. At one time the mere fact that a communication was encrypted would have been enough to provoke interest but today it's so common that probably 90% of data in encrypted in one form or another.

    The scale of data sources is mind-blowing. Let's say, for arguments sake, that the population of the UK is 62 million souls. How many of them have, and use, PCs, mobile phones, lap-tops, tablet PCs and a plethora of other networked communication devices? I heard somewhere on the news yesterday that we send/receive something like 70 million emails A DAY in this country - and that doesn't include things like text messages from 'phones or messenger services.

    The bottom line, as far as I'm concerned at any rate, is that we having nothing to worry about unless we're planning a bombing campaign or aiming for world domination (and not on an XBox 360 either).

    Do I feel any safer as a result? Probably not!

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