How would you feel if you know your every move was being tracked?

This is the bigger of several other issues people are concerned about; a police officer needs comparatively little to gain access to your private world. The bill doesn't even make a detailed outline of what constitutes the right amount of evidence to invade your life, only saying, "to allow interceptions only when there are strong arguments that the provision of evidence should be considered more important than the protection of confidentiality or privacy".

What exactly does that mean? Humorously, it's kind of like walking up to the door of a suspected criminal and asking him or her for the evidence to convict them =). This clear lack of regulation has many people worried because the system could easily be abused. Corrupt police officers or those who don't know what they are doing could easily intercept information.

Will it work though?

There are several issues that the system doesn't take into account or that simply haven't been looked at. Firstly is that most half intelligent criminals would use free E-Mail services (Hotmail) and not there own ISPs. What about hackers? They could fake a person and be using somebody else's details, so just how valid could the evidence (if any) be?

Who would operate the system? Surely you'd need a special group of officers like they have in the USA and not just your average Joe policeman, the bill mentions no specifics. Not to mention that even if you do send E-Mail using your ISPs address, you don't actually have to send it via their network. Most ISPs leave the ability to send via another server wide open, thus you could totally circumvent the security device.

So any true criminal only needs half a brain to know not to use their ISPs E-Mail service and to do everything else over the likes of IRC or ICQ, two global systems that are next to impossible to regulate officially. So will it work? Yes it will, but the chances of it actually catching any really bad people are limited at best. Thus the people most at risk are big businesses and those suspected, but not actually involved, in crime. Here we are back at square one again.

Conclusion

If you look at the whole picture with a wise eye then you can see just what's really happening. The ability to view an ISPs client E-Mailings sorely limits the systems potential to actually catch people. However they've got us so completely focused on the E-Mail side that most people utterly forget about the bill itself.

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