An even Bigger Brother

This brings us to the next more important issue, the one of privacy. There will be a lot of people wanting to get their hands on this data and get it they will. This government cannot even keep a simple blacklist secure. The data will be used for profiling, marketing and identity theft. The entertainment industry will also be keen to gain access so as to further their litigation against downloaders.

Then there is the question of using the data for blackmail or to embarrass. We have already seen that television stations have no qualms about invading one’s privacy to embarrass them. You only have to look at what Channel Seven did to New South Wales politician, David Campbell: what he had done is considered morally wrong but actually he did nothing illegal.

Imagine Johnny, just turned 18 and wanting to see what baloobas really looked like, visits playboy.com, a legal site to visit. Fast forward 10 years and Johnny is applying for a bank loan or for a job or if he is a real glutton for punishment, wishes to stand for parliament. The sites that he visited 10 years ago are now coming back to haunt him.

He would not even had to have visited these sites as someone wanting to frame him can easily install a Trojan that quietly works in the background of his computer sending requests to these sites thus allowing them to be logged without his knowledge.

What if the information is used to profile your political/sexual/religious or other persuasion? Will this profiling lead to discrimination, victimisation or blackmail? How can you protect your financial accounts when your transactions are logged and recorded? Will people gain access to user names and passwords that are logged? Will ISPs sell this data to marketing firms in order to pay for the cost of this regime? What will a future, potentially unethical government do with this data?

The proposed regime has the potential to make crime fighting harder and is fraught with a myriad of potential problems. It should also be noted that only half of the countries in the EU have implemented the directive is some form and that Germany was forced to scrap the directive after the Federal Constitutional Court found the directive to be unconstitutional. To borrow a phrase from the mining industry’s campaign against another hare-brained scheme - I don’t think the government has thought this through.