British liberty ctd.

I'm a little late on this one because I've been travelling this week:

Information about all landline and mobile phone calls made in the UK must be logged and stored for a year under new laws. Data about calls made and received will also be available to 652 public bodies, including the police and councils. The Home Office said the content of calls and texts would not be read and insisted the move was vital to tackle serious crime and terrorism.

Note the fairly waffly statement that "calls and texts would not be read". It doesn't say "can not be read" because we know from common sense that they will be, when the government or police decide that this too has become 'vital'.

Note also the huge number of organizations who'll have access to the information; it will practically be public information. (i.e. what private investigator or hacker won't be able to access it for the right price?).

Note further, if you read the article, that our physical locations will now be officially tracked and recorded when we make calls or send texts.

On the basis of several technologies, including CCTV, automatic number plate recognition (recording all car journeys), Oyster cards (recording all public transit journeys), and this new phone logging, the government will now have a record of where we are and where we go at all times. Clever terrorists and criminals, of course, will evade these methods by doing things like, for example, using anonymous pay-as-you-go SIM cards in their mobile phones (available for a few pounds in the dodgier news agents) and changing them frequently. It will be the rest of us who are effectively tracked by these methods. Feel safer now?

What part of "police state" don't we understand?