Nothing to see there, no sir, totally normal to spend £125,000 per seat, no misuse of public funds for any big database trial not approved by Parliament and illegal under the law, nope, not at all, just a normal IT upgrade, so go about your business good citizen.

I'm busy doing CRM until this Friday.

I feel Crapita, Detica, Atos, et al must dribbling at the moment at the prospect of getting some senior IT staff sacked in five years for failing to control a project that's runaway (with some help from verbal kint and friends) and which solves nothing that didn't used to be done in Excel.

They should take note of what their colleagues in other government departments are doing, and take the whole kit and caboodle in house.

Let me be Professor Trelawney for a second, "It's going to be a big, all encompassing system that does everything, and will be delivered, a day early, a few years in the future, after integrating and replacing all the old systems thus leveraging modernity, synergy and bleeding edge enterprise technolgies (tm) (c) Pat. Pending. Neville! Is your grandmother in good health? Don't be so sure boy."

So instead of trying to get approval for the mass surveillance database past Parliament, it looks like she's trying to get a law for 'lowering data sharing barriers' together with a massive 'revamping of IT systems' budget (4000 seats, 5k a seat, = 20 million, leaving 480 million to spend on something else, presumably her massive surveillance database), together with the implementation of the EU Data Retention directive.

i.e. she builds the database with a SOCA IT budget as a crime fighting database. That database accepts ISP data feeds adhoc as needed by the EU Data Retention Directive. but shockingly is massively bigger than the 2GB of Communications data it needs to store (200k CDRs per year according to the 'watchdog').

Ministry of Justice gets it's 'enhanded data sharing review', and nutjob gets her mass surveillance database of all communications by simply eliminating the 'barrier to sharing of data' between the ISP and Government.

All the elements seem to be there, just no democratic controls.

Remember the Ministry of Justice data sharing review:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/reviews/datasharing-intro.htm