Liberal Democrats have uncovered the Governments latest installment of ‘Big Brother’ society with plans to monitor activity on social
networking sites. Home Office minister Vernon Coaker revealed the shocking proposals in a series of exchanges with Liberal Democrat Home
Affairs spokesman Tom Brake.

In the admission, Vernon Coaker disclosed that social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace may be forced to retain private
information about users’ web-browsing habits including the name of every person they correspond with on the site. This mass-surveillance strategy
will be executed under a terror strategy guise, even though almost half the British population – some 25 million people – are members of social
networking sites and are unlikely to have any links with terrorism.

The illiberal move has been attacked by Liberal Democrat MPs, security experts and civil liberty groups alike with Tom Brake describing the
proposals as, “the most expensive snooper’s charter in history”. “It is deeply worrying that they now intend to monitor social networking sites
which contain very sensitive data like sexual orientation, religious beliefs and political views. ”

Tom Brake added that, “Given the Government’s disastrous record with large IT projects and data security, it is likely that data will leak
out of every memory stick, port and disk drive when they start monitoring Facebook, Bebo and MySpace.”

You can back the Liberal Democrat campaign to restore people’s privacy and freedom at http://freedom.libdems.org.uk