Well said BanWork, I wish we had a few more people like you in the Lib Dems who are more willing to campaign...!Having said this, I am not sure we can count on public support to maintain our privacy as we deal with concepts that most of them have trouble grasping ; even the fundamentals of Public Key Cryptography can take a lay person hours to grasp, so you see our problem!At the risk of sounding paranoid, in order to operate safely we must assume as you say that Big Brother is very much here and is analysing the content of our telephone calls / clear net e-mails / SMS - the simple solution is to stop using them and make sure we Torify our connections and use GPG to encode any sensitive messages/e-mails!V.Quote from: BanWork on May 16, 2012, 11:09 pmQuote from: vlad1m1r on May 16, 2012, 08:23 pmFirstly it's important to bear in mind that this is not nearly as Orwellian as everyone is making out - calls and text messages will be logged but the content won't be recorded in the absence of a court order (at least in theory!).Yer but no but..... ;D The bigger Orwellian picture is the direction in which we are slowly and steadily creeping, this bill is a firm step in that direction. Simple communication logs sound wonderfully benign right now (after all, its helps us catch 'the terrorists'/bogeyman) but for one, you can count on the fact that this system WILL (statistically speaking) be abused at some point, and to the detriment of some poor innocent sucker. Government monitoring who i call or email day in day out and storing that information indefinitely is alarming to put it mildly. All these soft little benign changes when amalgamated may add up to a malignant government that can micro manage the behavior of every citizen in order to benefit whatever private entity has the most cash to 'wine and dine' (bribe) politicians. That's why its important to get pissed off and kick up a stink about every inch 'they' slither forward.20 years from now those logs may be used in your very own country by a fascist dictator (stick with me) to detain and torture you (or anyone) because you had a school buddy who turned out to be the contemporary definition of a 'terrorist' ... we just don't know what the future holds, so why be slack about our security now? Fight for every inch IMO.