David Cameron defends government proposals to monitor calls, emails, texts and websites visits, claiming that the move is necessary to stop crime and would not be a “snoopers’ charter”.
It comes as the Sun newspaper published a letter from Home Secretary Teresa May, where she says similar monitoring techniques helped put murderer Ian Huntley and the killers of Rhys Jones behind bars.
…and lo! it’s true:
PLANS to monitor millions of emails, texts and website visits are vital to trap killers like Ian Huntley and smash paedo rings, Theresa May declares today.
Writing in The Sun, the Home Secretary says the new powers are needed to “help police stay one step ahead of the criminals”.
The Sun’s covering article gets 143 comments, and the actual Davis vs: May commentary article garners another 33.
This is as opposed to (say) 1745 comments on sunday’s BBC article.
I can’t shake the impression that the Tories decided to play the tabloid paedocard in expectation of a mob’s rising up to bay for state control of this evil child-molesting new Facebook thing – but this tactic has been done to death* and given the state of economy people have less time to dedicate to pitchfork-waving.
One guy living just down the street from me survives on 70 quid a week; he wants Ebay to work so he can sell his possessions, but thinks social media an irrelevance. I don’t think he’ll be engaged on the side of the Home Secretary.
If the Government wants to bring its case, they should bring it to the Twittersphere and see what happens; at the moment it’s getting severely kicked, jumped up and down upon, lampooned, and (at best) ignored, with no-one to defend it.
*for the moment; doubtless it will come round again, next time someone invents new technology.
Leave a Reply