'Online snooping' scheme expected to cost at least £1.8bn
The government's "online snooping" scheme to track email, Facebook, Twitter and other web use comes with an official pricetag of at least £1.8bn and an official warning that the figure may well prove to be an underestimate, the Home Office has revealed.
Ministers have already agreed to pay all the costs of the scheme, which will require phone and internet companies to collect and store for 12 months the records of internet and mobile phone use in Britain for access by police and intelligence services.
The draft communications data bill published on Thursday says the move will cost £1.8bn over 10 years but that an official impact assessment says the pricetag is in line with the Treasury's "optimism bias" that understates the cost of major projects. It adds that the technical complexity of the scheme may well increase the costs and that the estimate does not allow for inflation or VAT.
The former Tory shadow home secretary David Davis accused the home secretary, Theresa May, of proposing an "incredibly intrusive'' scheme that was exactly the same as the proposal David Cameron had attacked when Labour proposed it in office.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/14/online-snooping-home-office-cost
Unless the government are heavily into banjos, which I doubt, I don't think they'd find too much on me.
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I don't play aside from which I don't really like Bluegrass - I prefer Old Time American Traditonal music which means clawhammerstyle etc. I thought I might be regarded as dangerous because I've still got 80 or so banjos quite aside from 30 guitars which I can't play either. 
From the Transatlantic sessions :
And the classic version from the thirties which I first heard on a 78 rpm in Kentucky late 2002.
The story goes that the tune was first played by Scots pipers to the French as they left the field at the Battle of Waterloo.
I don't really believe that May's taste in music reaches this far. On the subject of house parties Tom Paley is a friend of friend who is the luthier who restores stuff for me aside from being one of the best 5 string clawhammer players in the country. Tom plays often at an old time session in Islington Sunday nights which is how I got to know him. In the knowledge some years back that he'd be performing in the US I arranged for another friend in VA to run a house party which went down a storm.
