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... GL@BAL NEWS ... NEWS SECRET PLAN TO SPY ON ALL BRITISH PHONE CALLS & E-MAILS Burs intelligence services are seeking powers to seize all records of telephone calls, e-mails and Internet connections made by every person living in the UK. The document, circulated to Home Office officials and obtained by The Observer, reveals that MIS, MI6 and the police are demanding new legislation to log every phone call made in this country and store the information for seven years at a vast government-run "data warehouse" with a supercomputer that will hold the information. The secret moves, which are expected to cost millions of pounds, have been condemned by politicians and campaigners as a sinister expansion of "Big Brother" state powers and a fun- damental attack on the public's right to privacy. "We are sympathetic to the need for greater powers to fight modern types of crime. But vast banks of information on every member of the public can quickly slip into the world of Big Brother," said Lord Cope, the Conservative peer and a leading expert on privacy issues. Maurice Frankel, a leading campaigner on personal data issues, called the powers "sweep- ing" and a cause for worry. The document, which is classified "Restricted", says new laws are needed to allow the intelligence services, Customs and Excise and the police access to telephone and computer records of every member of the public. It suggests that the Home Office is sympathetic to the new powers, which would be used to tackle the growing problems of cybercrime, the use of computers by paedophiles to run child pornography rings, as well as terrorism and interna- tional drug trafficking. When contacted by The Observer, the Home Office admitted that it was giving the plans serious consideration. Every telephone call made and received by a member of the public, all e-mails sent and received and every web page looked at would be recorded. Calls made on mobile phones can already be pinpointed geographically, as can those made from land lines. The police would be able to use "trawling" computer techniques to look through millions of telephone and e- mail records. Campaigners say innocent people could have highly personal information accessed. The document admits the moves are controversial and could clash with the Human Rights Act which gives people the right to privacy, with European Union law, and with the Data Protection Act which protects the public against official intrusion into private lives. "A clear legislative framework needs to be agreed as a matter of urgency," says the docu- ment, which is dated 10 August 2000 and is thought to have been sent to Home Office Minister Charles Clarke. "Why should data be retained?" it asks. "In the interests of justice, to preserve and protect data for use as evidence to establish proof of innocence or guilt. For intelligence- and evi- dence-gathering purposes, to maintain the effectiveness of UK law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies to protect society." The document is written by Roger Gaspar, the Deputy Director-General of the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), the government agency which oversees criminal intel- ligence in the United Kingdom. Gaspar, as head of intelligence for NCIS, is one of the most powerful and influential men in the field. The report says it is written "on behalf of ACPO [the Association of Chief Police Officers], HM Customs and Excise, Security Service, Secret Intelligence Service and GCHQ [the Government's secret listening centre based at Cheltenham]". Gaspar argues telephone companies should be ordered to retain all records of phone calls and Internet access. At the moment, many telephone and Internet service providers keep data for as little as 24 hours. "In the interests of verifying the accuracy of data specifically provided for either intelli- gence or evidential purposes, CSPs [communication service providers such as telephone and Internet companies] should be under an obligation to retain the original data supplied for a period of seven years or for as long as the prosecuting authority directs," the document says. "Informal discussions have taken place with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Whilst they acknowledge that such communications data may be of value to the work of the agencies and the interests of justice, they have grave reservations about longer-term data retention." The document says that the new data warehouse would be run along similar lines to the National DNA Database of profiles of known criminals. A spokesman for NCIS refused to be drawn on the report. "I am not going to comment on a classified document that is in unauthorised hands," he said. (Source: The Observer, London, 3 December 2000, www.observer.co.uk) like a brain, which operates chemically. Because the processors’ functions are caused by chemical rather than mechanical reactions, they can be far smaller than any other technology, which means we can use more of them and make them more power- ful. The Internet we have today is nothing compared to the system we will have tomorrow," Mr Haran said. (Source: Gulf News, Dubai, UAE, 31 October 2000, www.gulf-news.com) RISK OF vC/D FROM BSE-INFECTED VACCINES uestionable cattle products have gone into baby food, pet food, beauty prepa- rations, health supplements and vaccines. Only last November, British health authori- ties withdrew supplies of polio vaccine after discovering they were cultivated from British bovine serum produced when BSE, or mad cow disease, was at its height. Eleven million children and travellers have received the oral vaccine. Vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria and whooping cough also were made from British-sourced bovine material until at least 1993. The government said that the risk of con- tracting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from vaccine was "incalculably small", but this is not what was said by Sir Richard Southwood, author of the first major British mad cow investigation. He warned in an internal memorandum that the danger of infection from vaccines was "moderately high", and recommended that the removal of bovine material from vaccines should be a priority area for action. Estimates of eventual deaths from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease range from "sev- eral dozen", according to the French health secretary Dominique Gillot, to 250,000, as in a recent British Government study. "We might be seeing an epidemic that involves hundreds of thousands of people," said John Collinge of the UK's advisory committee on spongiform encephalo- pathies. "Let's hope that is not the case, but it’s still possible." John Kent, a professor of statistics at Leeds University who has tried to quantify the crisis, said that the mathematical mod- els were not to be trusted because scientists do not know how to determine what is an infectious dose and do not know how many people have eaten infected meat. (Source: The International Herald Tribune, UK, 7 December 2000, www.iht.com) NEXUS <9 FEBRUARY — MARCH 2001