January 22, 2009

Facebook 'super database' protesters plan to spam Home Office

Plan to CC all emails to Jacqui Smith for one day

By Siobhan Chapman, Computerworld UK

A Facebook protest against the government's planned £12 billion 'super database' of electronic communications has called on people to forward all their emails to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for one day.

Civil liberty lobbyists have started a Facebook group to protest against the government's plans to build a "superdatabase" that will track all emails, calls, texts and internet use.

The Facebook group, called 'cc all your emails to Jacqui Smith Day', has called people to "cc" or "bcc" every email they send and forward all emails they receive, regardless of importance or content, to the Home Office's public enquiry email address: public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.

"That way Jacqui Smith and the Home Office will be able to see how difficult it will be to get on with their actual work - keeping our country safe - when they're trying to monitor every harmless private thing we say and do," said a statement on the Facebook group's web page. The statement described the database "an immense infringement of civil liberties, not to mention a major risk to our private data - but it won't make us any safer".

"The sheer amount of information that the Government intends to collect will be impossible to analyse properly and will undoubtedly turn up false positives while missing potential security threats amongst the morass of spam emails and private chat," said the statement.

The Facebook group also objects to the government's plans to let a private company build and manage the database. The government proposes to let a private company collect the data in a bid to reduce the costs involved, which were initially estimated at £12 billion. The proposal also called for tough legal penalties to be put in place should the data be misused, according to a report in The Guardian.

The group has not yet decided a date for the protest.

At time of writing, the group had 2,096 members.

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