Passport or other ID needed to buy mobile phones!

Welcome to Big Brother Britain: 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. (link via timesonline.co.uk) It's not just the database (yes, another database!) that's frightening, but the way it can be used to track everyone's movements that is truly alarming: Government faces fight from within for spy database excerpt from The Sunday Times article: Phones can be located to within a few yards using cell site analysis – which tracks mobile phone users as they move from one signalling area to the next. The system would then link with the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system of traffic cameras, which provides live coverage of motor-ways and main roads. It, in turn, is linked to the DVLA in Swansea which holds the records of all registered vehicles in the country. By monitoring a single telephone call it would be possible to identify exactly where its user was and the registration number of the car in which he or she was travelling. This car could then be found within seconds by the ANPR cameras and tracked along its journey. Simon Davies, of Privacy International, said: “If you can do this in real time, with all the databases being interoperable, you have absolute perfect surveillance.” What a fun country we live in - apart from a couple important things like freedom and privacy. Freedom? What freedom? Privacy? What privacy? The government wants the databases under the pretence of security and immigration control but all these databases give the British government immense power over everyone in the UK. You know what really scares me? It's bad enough to think of the way they keep losing data but wait for the time when the data is mixed up either accidentally or deliberately! There is no such thing as a foolproof system. Are you as worried as I am about the direction Britain is heading?