The Home Office claims the new database, which can track phone calls and emails, is necessary in an advancing digital world to allow it to tackle terrorism and serious crime.

I sometimes feel like the government watches hollywood movies and takes them under advisement. Are you fucking serious? The very symbols of modern democracy are being taken away to fight terrorism which is against those principals. I know saying this isn't anything new, but my god, think about that just one more time. We lose. At least our governments do unless/until we force them to behave properly. There is always dangers everywhere, that is life, there are risks, we need to stop cowering around and give up everything that makes life worth living for an extra measure of 'security' which can never be proven effective. If technology were our savior from all evil, then we wouldn't see all sorts of malware, spyware and viruses succeed so wildly. Technology is a tool not a complete solution. Life has ambiguity and risks, by waking up you are dealing with them and taking them: that is what makes us, us.

On a similar note, since technology isn't some all supreme power and people have the right to privacy, that's what this site is here for: providing you with info and tools to protect your privacy namely through use of proxies.

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) urged a California court Friday to overturn a dangerous ruling that would require an Internet search engine to create and store logs of its users' activities as part of electronic discovery obligations in a civil lawsuit.

The ruling came in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by motion picture studios against TorrentSpy, a popular search engine that indexes materials made publicly available via the Bit Torrent file sharing protocol. TorrentSpy has never logged its visitors' Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Notwithstanding this explicit privacy policy, a federal magistrate judge has now ordered TorrentSpy to activate logging and turn the logged data over to the studios.

"This unprecedented ruling has implications well beyond the file sharing context," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Giving litigants the power to rewrite their opponent's privacy policies poses a risk to all Internet users."

I know the EFF gets a lot of flak for what they do, but I have to give them credit (and money) for what they are trying to do. Whether they are too ideal in their beliefs of just plain crazy, they really do try and prevent all sorts of privacy invading court rulings and programs.

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