Summary: A bill will expand the surveillance capabilities of Britain's equivalent to. A former NSA director believes it will collect so much irrelevant data that their analysts will be unable to efficiently find useful information on terrorist attacks or similar. The lost lives are a reference to people who may die in attacks that could have been prevented had they collected data in a different manner.

This argument doesn't seem to have made much difference to the national DNA database[1]. Innocent people have had to go to court to get the rules changed and to have their DNA taken off the database.

"They" want everyone's dna on the database. And police have said that there's no reason to take a person's DNA off the database.

Your DNA is taken and added to the database if you're arrested. You don't have to accept a caution; nor be tried, nor convicted, of a crime for them to keep it. Some people can apply to have it taken off, but it stays on their for two years for everyone.

With the current climate I can easily see "all immigrants need to go on the database" being populist bit of legislation.

[1] typing that name, about my country, feels weird and wrong.

Yes but with a complete DNA database you can match an external sample exactly to the database with (near) complete accuracy. The DNA database doesn't tell you anything itself.

With a database of all communications you have to mine it for probabilistic leads. The signal to noise problem grows as does the database.

Someone else (I cant recall who) said - the last thing you need when looking for a needle in a haystack is more hay.

How many years till they start analyzing the DNA for behavioural risk factors?

One deathcount they're missing is a database is widely believed to be more valuable in proportion to the number of people with access, to the limiting stage of everyone has access to everything except for the general public, see credit and shopping data in the USA, etc.

So the specific deathcount increase is once 5% of the population has access to everyone's data, 1 in 20 abusers will have access to their victims data, to help track down and kill or otherwise continue to abuse.

Likewise it'll be a profitable source of blackmail data.

Or for unscrupulous journalists.

The recent phone hacking scandal proved that there's few lengths some papers will go to in search of a juicy story.

I wonder how much they'd have to give to some disenfranchised ISP employee to get a couple of years worth of [insert famous name]'s browsing history.

I used to work at British Telecom and they where very hot on this issue. BT Security do not fuck about when they investigate this sort of crime.

Developers with wide access to data had to be positively vetted to TS level.

A few years ago there was a contract killer that suborned BT employees to find the address of some one in the witness protection schemes parents new address and killed them. The people concerned are doing 10-20 years for conspiracy.

That sounds good but I hope the disparity of the effect and punishment is obvious: victims lost their lives because data existed that probably should not have been collected and the people responsible for the leak are alive and will be free in 10-20 years.

You can't run a phone company without customer information or knowing where all your plant is :-)

This was the standard Billing Data not the secret squrel side of the biz.

Wow. Just how former is this director? Article quotes William Binney I know him. Just as a point of reference wikipedia says that he resigned on October 31, 2001.

Did anyone think of the new Apple building when they saw that picture? Wonder if that's a coincidence ;-)

Prior art. The Doughnut was built in 2003. :)