Info office to monitor blogs

The Central Office of Information is developing a media briefings service to inform government about major online debates. The COI's Media Monitoring Unit (MMU) is working on an online monitoring product to track public debates from blogs. It aims to highlight those that generate significant debate on government policy and …

[Anonymous Coward]

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Inter company VAT zero rated to reduce the paperwork companies face and fix Carousel fraud.

Quit making everything illegal. Quit making Brits into criminals for no good reason. Roll back all those little nuisance laws twat-man brought in.

2004/38/EC 5(2) fixed, you'd better read up the foreign blogs too.

More Privacy, Less Biometric, fingerprinting, ying yangs.

Quit scapegoating. SUV drivers are not to blame for everything. Car drivers are not satan. More carrot less stick. Fix public transport before you expect everyone to switch to it.

....

[Mark]

joined up government

Give it a year or two, and they'll be crossing this with the ID card, CCTV and the latest round of terrorism legislation and employing the odd cut price outsourced hacker. Then, lo and behold, before the metaphorical digital ink is dry on your lovingly crafted "Labour are w****rs" blog post, your blog will be back "on message" and you'll be presented with a fixed penalty notice for anti-social behaviour/terrorism (or perhaps a hellfire missile if you diss Gordon too personally) conveniently delivered by modified Predator drone as you're heading off to Tesco's. Or perhaps they'll ban any protest blogs within X number of IPs from the Downing st website.

Or perhaps I should get out more.

[frank denton]

Been Done Before - In The Future

Does anyone remember the Foundation Trilogy, a science fiction novel (set in the far future) in which the government tracked public opinion and preferences by clandestine monitoring, and then modified it's policies to suit (only an incidental part of the story actually). I believe a similar process was in place in Shockwave Rider.

Perhaps in the near future, if the 'people' can find out which blogs are being monitored, we can deliberately target these blogs by contributing in a manner that shifts policy to our desires.

Then we'll have civil info-wars between different groups, all trying to modify government policy in this way. The mind boggles.

I'm not going to say anything about a government that places the results of clandestine snooping on a par with public consultation. They have fears of 'being blindsided' by their own people? Being blindsided is what your opponent or enemy does to you. Oh.....I see.....

[Anonymous Coward]

They can take our (virtual)-lives, and they can also take our freedoms!!!

<comment type="scareMongering" tongueInCheek="Firmly">

Hands up all those who can see this being integrated with the central IT system, ID Cards, NHS IT Scheme, your passport, nectar card and just about everything else you own or thought was sacred.

Before we know it, they'll know what we're going to do from the habits on our nectar/tesco/credit cards, where we're going to do it from our bank statements, who we're going to do it with from the ID cards, if there are any health risks from the NHS Central computers and finally, how it all went by reading our Blogs.

YOUR MIND IS NO LONGER SAFE - RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!

</comment>

Anonymous? Too-right. I don't want my blog to be read... ;o)

[mike]

comments

The next thing that will happen you will post a blog criticizing Gordon and the man himself posts a comment spelling out his policy or is that spinning out. either that or you get your door kicked in and whisked off to the slammer for a little reconditioning.