This is an article from today’s BBC News, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8020039.stm

By Dominic Casciani BBC News home affairs reporter

Social networks: Data recorded – but not content

Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.

The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services. The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites. The Tories said the Home Office had “buckled under Conservative pressure” in deciding against a giant database.

Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications data and its use in law enforcement, Jacqui Smith said there would be no single government-run database. [Read more]

MI5 and UK police groom thousands to spy on public

MI5 is currently training up to 60,000 UK citizens as part a civilian network of terrorist spotters, according to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and home secretary, Jacqui Smith.

Details of the initiative were revealed yesterday as part of the British Government’s new £3.5bn a year counter-terrorist framework known as “Contest Two”.

Writing in the London Observer yesterday, Gordon Brown outlined how large numbers of staff on rail networks, at airports, shopping centres, public buildings and sports venues are already being groomed by MI5 and the police and trained to watch for “suspicious behaviour”.

“We should be under no illusion that the biggest security threat to our country and other countries is the murderous agents of hate that work under the banner of al-Qaida,” Brown wrote. [Read more]