So theresa may [sic] wants to justify monitoring and storing all of our private data on the basis of a threat from "terrorists", "peadophiles", and "serious criminals"? Okay, let's have a look at some stats then.
MI5 has it that out of 1834 people arrested under the Terrorism Act between September 11th 2011 and 2010, just 102 were classified as terrorists.
[1] As of 2010 Britain was populated by 62,218,761 people.
[2] It's also understood (on the basis of a police study, so I'd be dubious about these statistics too, given how prone they are to tampering) that 0.5% of the population are "peadophiles".
[3] As I wouldn't know where to find stats on "serious criminals" not in prison, I'll just use the total prison population as a guide (remembering that a lot of prisoners will be in there for crimes which aren't considered serious) which is 97,000
[4] - so if my maths is right that constitutes 0.15% of the population.
So even if we do grant the figures from MI5 and the police, in lieu of a proper grasp of how they compiled their stats... can we really justify the wholesale storage of the private data of 62,218,761 other people on the basis of such an overwhelmingly small proportion of people? Seems to me like the rest of us, the largest majority, are the real target here. We're all potential criminals in their eyes, they just don't wanna outright say it.