Oh dear
"Speaking at the (ISC)2 security conference in London, Blunkett told The Register that the expansion of the act’s powers to include snooping on journalists goes into "areas that it was never intended that people should have authorisation for.”"
This is the whole point of laws being passed that have a limited, and well defined scope, rather than the large number of poorly worded and overly broad 'anti-terrorism' laws his party passed. (Not that the current lot are better, by any means, but credit where credit's due...)
Rather than a 'complete review', how about we take all those poorly thought out laws, scrap them, and replace them with something fit for purpose. The truth is, that after hundreds of years of democracy, very few new laws are actually needed, but politicians need to do something to continue to justify their own extravagant existence. The problem here is that the laws that get passed tend to increase authoritarianism, and the powers of parliament. Certain powers held by the Home Secretary, for example, should, in a proper democracy, be held by a member of the judiciary. I'd be much more confident in the oversight of all things terrorism related by a senior judge who is not influenced by the five-year election cycle and his own political image.
It's not like terrorism is a new thing, and we handled it perfectly well in the '70s and '80s when the IRA were blowing things up, without any of these new laws.
The only really new thing we have to contend with in the last few decades is the advent of the internet, and there's no reason existing laws cannot be amended to cover such changes where they are insufficient (e.g. laws covering theft, fraud, etc.) The actual problem lies in the fact that a lot of crimes are now committed remotely from another country, so the thing our politicos should be focussing on is the establishment of international treaties to clamp down on things like phishing, spamming, and various international internet cons.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
