Posts by Chris Parsons 583 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2008
Too bloody true. I worked for a well-known American company and some daft woman from HR called me up and said that she was not happy with the diversity of my team. I asked her who she wanted me to get rid of, and she said I wasn't being helpful. We live in an unreal world.
Having chosen not to have children myself, I have always thought there should be some sort of licence for parenting. It might even put an end to the f*ckwits who consider taking their little darlings to the pub and then ignoring them as a suitable alternative to babysitting.
@ The Big Yin
I contacted mine, for all the good it did. He didn't quite say 'think of the children', but it came close.
For anyone that's interested, here are his honeyed words:
"Communications data is vital for the police in their fight against crime, including serious offences such as child abuse, drug dealing and terrorism.
It is important that we get the balance right between upholding civil liberties and the right to privacy and protecting the public by maintaining the ability of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies to access vital communications data in an ever more dangerous world. Communications data has played a role in 95 per cent of all serious organised crime investigations and every major Security Service counter-terrorism operation over the last decade. Already a quarter of communications data required by the police and agencies can no longer be acquired because the relevant data is not available at the necessary level of quality and timeliness – we need to halt and reverse this.
I would like to make it clear that the Government has no intention to provide the police and others with new powers to intercept and read e-mails and phone calls. The proposals do not weaken current safeguards or checks in place to protect private correspondence. There are no powers to share this information with private investigators or journalists and indeed there are serious sanctions for abusing access to personal data. What it does allow is the police and intelligence services to access this contextual information on the internet in the same way as they can currently access it via telephone records. Under no circumstances will these proposals authorise the interception and storage of the content of a communication – what was written in an e-mail or said over the telephone. That will always require a warrant signed by the Secretary of State.
As you may be aware, the Intelligence and Security Committee and a joint committee of both Houses recently conducted pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Communications Data Bill. The Home Office considered the recommendations of these committees and will be accepting the substance of all of them and re-drafting the legislation on that basis.
I hope that I have gone some way towards addressing your concerns. Thank you for drawing this issue to my attention."
The terribly depressing thing is that they're all as bad as each other.
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