UK Firemen Can Read Your Email

from the um,-but-why? dept

I don't follow data privacy laws outside the US to carefully, so this one is a bit of a surprise to me. According to this article, under a new "snooper's charter", fire authorities and ambulance services will now be able to request access to your phone records and internet data. Why does the fireman need to read your email? Not really sure, but the option is there for them. In a separate, but related announcement, phone companies now need to keep copies of all such records for a year.
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  1. identicon
    steve poling, 13 Sep 2003 @ 10:23am

    sounds like a bradbury novel

    it's simple to understand why firemen want to read your email. It's to findout if you've got any books so that they can torch them at Farenheit 451.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    micm, 13 Sep 2003 @ 4:42pm

    It's not so stupid..

    Post Bain reveiw, fire crews are supposed to move their focus from fighting fires to fire prevention. This means doing some work to catch arsonists and so on. Also the main cause of injury to firefighters these days is assault rather than fire/smoke related.
    Of course before the police would be involved with these types of thing, but the option is now there to remove the middle man where it makes sense. For example think of someone making repeated hoax calls to 999 (112 etc) - before it would have to be raised to the police and there would be a whole load of messing about whilst not a lot happened. Under the new laws the Fire Brigade (Fire Department) can request phone records directly from the phone companies directly. That's just one example, there are many more which I shan't go in to.
    Of course you could argue that the police should be more efficient at dealing with requests of behalf of the other emergency services in which case they probably wouldn't be asking for access to this stuff...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 13 Sep 2003 @ 10:51pm

    For cases when someone sends a suicide note via em

    For cases when someone sends a suicide note via email, they need to locate the person.

    Story says warrent is required.

    Like someone else said, can't police handle this stuff for the fire service?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 14 Sep 2003 @ 2:05am

    The answer is very simple (but thelogic is contort

    See, firemen were kill on 9/11; so, the get invited to the freedom killing party that "authorities" in the US are now currently having.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    cemal tarik ipcioglu, 1 Sep 2006 @ 1:41am

    im fireman

    im a firemen. im from turkey but i workıng now unıted arab emırates quıck ınterventıon unıt.but ı want workıng new country and i need good work.mybe some contry want fireman ım here. tarik_09_tr@hotmail.com.. send me msjj..

    link to this | view in thread ]


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