Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that thinks this plan is full of it?

So, an evil government schemes 1984-style to create a database of all your emails, phone usage, and websites visited. So, they're going to spend many times the budget of Google for practically no purpose? Do they not understand how much data that is? I mean, Google doesn't even store that amount of data given that they store a very small fraction of the internet's email. And the UK government during a financial crisis is going to build something that stores exabytes of data?

Not only the storage of that information, but how are they going to operate on it? Looking for patterns in that much data? I just don't see it happening. I mean, Yahoo and Google don't operate on nearly that much data and I'd say they're probably the largest scale computing operations out there.

Anyone think this sounds like Reagan's Star Wars missile defense?

The purpose of Star Wars was to bankrupt the Soviet Union, at which it succeeded magnificently. Cold War won, without a shot fired. That is strategy, my friend.

The purpose of this is to fill the pockets of EDS shareholders. No-one in the government has the slightest clue about IT, they believe whatever the consultants tell them. From the outside it's obviously a ridiculous idea. But inside the civil service, you've got this budget, you've got to spend it otherwise you'll get less next year, and it's not like you'll get fired whatever you do.

I'm always amazed how many people buy into that idea- do you really think that Reagan knew all along that it was a ploy to run the Soviet economy into the ground? SDI was a huge wealth transfer to the defense industry. The fall of the Soviet Union (if indeed you see that as a bad thing) had very little to do with a need to increase their military spending to keep par with Reagan.

If you follow the link to the BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7671046.stm

It looks like they aren't recording the content of the messages, just times and dates etc. The worrying is that they are already doing it, and the proposal is to extend the duration the data can be kept for, and to make it centrally searchable (paragraphs 5 and 7).

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