(Source: Irish Times)
By NEWTON EMERSON
A more detailed than usual timeline of the British hacking
scandal
Early 2000
Journalists at the News of the Worldrealise anyone can dial
unsecured voicemails.
June 2000
Tony Blair agrees to an expansion of the Echelon intelligence
system, enabling it to intercept every phone call, e-mail and
digital signal on earth.
July 2000
Parliament passes New Labour's Regulation of Investigatory Powers
Act, which outlaws phone-hacking by journalists but allows most
public bodies to spy on citizens without a warrant. Permitted
methods include e-mail, internet and telephone tapping, bugging
houses and cars and using "covert human intelligence sources".
March 2002
An academic study estimates the number of CCTV cameras in Britain
at 4.2 million, all basically unregulated. Police later dismiss this
as inaccurate and put the true figure at a mere 1.9 million.
October 2002
New Labour commissions Connecting for Health, a computer system
storing everyone's medical records and making them accessible to 1.4
million NHS staff. Following privacy complaints, patients are
allowed to opt out by calling their GP and explaining what they
think they have to hide.
November 2003
Parliament passes New Labour's Criminal Justice Act, allowing the
police to store the DNA of anyone arrested in England and Wales,
whether or not they are charged. Entries to the database, already
the largest in the world, rise to 30,000 a month.
March 2005
New Labour approves a national number-plate recognition system
using 2,000 computer-linked cameras to record 100 million vehicle
movements a day. The database is unregulated and available to police
and the intelligence services.
March 2006
Parliament passes New Labour's Identity Cards Act, introducing
compulsory biometric cards plus a national identity database storing
50 pieces of information on every UK citizen. The data is accessible
to 265 government departments and 48,000 private sector
organisations.
July 2006
The Home Office admits the police DNA database, now holding three
million samples, has been used for 20 academic studies into criminal
and racial profiling and that the private firm analysing the samples
has secretly kept copies.
August 2006
Councils across England admit installing 500,000 electronic
monitoring devices in wheelie bins without householders' knowledge.
November 2006
New Labour unveils the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which
will store background information on all 11.3 million adults who
have contact with children, including lifestyle issues and unproven
allegations.
April 2008
The BBC runs a TV licensing ad with the slogan "Your town, your
street, your home. It's all in the database." After numerous
complaints, it changes the slogan slightly and runs the ad again.
January 2009
New Labour launches ContactPoint, a child protection database
covering every under-18 in England and Wales and accessible to one
million officials including police. Due to privacy concerns,
politicians' children are exempted.
April 2009
New Labour signs a statutory instrument requiring everyone's
internet records to be stored for a year and made available to
"designated authorities".
Late 2010
The new Tory-led government cancels ID cards, scales back
Connecting for Health, reforms the Independent Safeguarding
Authority, regulates CCTV and number-plate recognition, deletes the
ContactPoint and national identity databases and stops police
storing innocent people's DNA. But David Cameron once hired a
journalist from the News of the World - clearly he must go.
Originally published by NEWTON EMERSON.
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