Facebook group to CC all email to Home Secretary
Defenders of privacy carbon copy Jacqui Smith
A UK Facebook group plans to protest the government's consultation into further communications monitoring by cc'ing Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on every one of their emails for a day.
A group called, unsurprisingly 'cc all your emails to Jacqui Smith" Day' plans to bombard Smith with every mail for 24 hours to show their objection to a massive database of UK communications, including emails and instant messages.
Infringement
"The government has unveiled plans for a private company to run a 'superdatabase' that will track all our emails, calls, texts, internet use and so on. This is an immense infringement of civil liberties, not to mention a major risk to our private data, but it won't make us any safer," reads the group's mission statement.
"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 among the morass of spam emails and private chat.
"So, for one day, we should send a message to the Home Office - 'you want to see our emails? OK then, here they are.'"
Disbelief
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There's understandable disbelief that a government with a track record of losing classified data is seeking to set up a database straight out of George Orwell's nightmares.
Although much of the justification for looking into the scheme has been under the umbrella of 'anti-terrorism', there have been widespread rumblings of malcontent about what many see as a huge breach of privacy.
The group has not yet finalised a date for the protest, but it has sailed past 3,000 members already.
Patrick Goss is the ex-Editor in Chief of TechRadar. Patrick was a passionate and experienced journalist, and he has been lucky enough to work on some of the finest online properties on the planet, building audiences everywhere and establishing himself at the forefront of digital content. After a long stint as the boss at TechRadar, Patrick has now moved on to a role with Apple, where he is the Managing Editor for the App Store in the UK.