Let me ask this question, because I genuinely don't know. Who exactly has the power/ability to legally snoop around on our computers at home, without our knowledge? I'd guess that the secret services do, but what about councils and commercial organisations? Do any of these have the ability to interecept our emails? Do they have an ability to poke around on our hard drives and read/steal private emails?
The reason I ask is because some rather odd things have happened on my computer recently, all since I put a request for anyone who had problems voting in the Barnet Council elections to email me.
My stats show that quite a few people have accessed the link to send me an email, in the last 5 days (over 30 people). How many emails have I got? One from the BBC. So 29 people clicked the link to send me an email and changed their mind? An even stranger thing happened. On the 13th May, a years worth of emails mysteriously deleted themselves from my hard drive. Do you want to know an even odder thing. The same thing happened to Don't Call Me Dave a while back and he lost six months worth of emails. DCMD put this down to a glitch. I did until I talked to him about it.
So who would want to spend time and money monitoring and knobbling me as someone who writes blogs about Barnet Council? Well maybe Barnet Council would, but would they have the technical skills or prowess? Probably not. What about their suppliers of technology? Well they probably would have the ability, as to whether they could do it legally or would be prepared to break the law, I have no idea. Why has all of this started since the blog asking for details of problems voting in the Hendon Parliamentary Election? Probably coincidence, but I'd be very interested to find out. Oh and if you are worried about whether someone is intercepting these emails and something you wished to keep private has been intercepted, then let me know via a comment on blogspot to this post.
As to the years worth of deleted emails. A true pain in the bum, but all of the really interesting stuff gets archived off to my memory stick and deleted from my outlook file, just in case. That's where the juicy stuff lives and it isn't kept at home (or at work).
Please email me if you can throw any light on any of these mysteries. If you don't get a reply within 24 hours, post a comment CLICK HERE TO EMAIL ME. Am I getting paranoid? Nope, just puzzled and I'd like an explanation. If someone is ploughing through my last year of email, I don't envy them.
Rog: I am sure that there are many who would love to spy on your emails etc but I would be sceptical about our council having the ability to go about this: remember we are talking about the authority which cannot even organise its own data protection procedures until a major loss occurred (ask 9,000 pupils at Barnet schools about that one) ...
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