How Tony Blair calculated Gigabytes into Feet
Talk Politics has an analysis of the utterly spurious "Gigabytes to Feet" conversion which Prime Minister Tony Blair used to try to justify 90 days detention without charge portion of the Terrorism Bill 2005,. at Prime Minister's Questions on the 9th November, during which he also quoted the discredited letter and report by Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman.
Has Tony Blair really never used a web search engine like Google or the "find" facility built into Windows or within word processing software like Word ?
Do the spin doctors and policy advisors at Number 10 Downing Street really not know that much more sophisticated forensic analysis tools are available to the police and security authorities with which to examine computer hard drives, none of which involve physically printing out forests worth of paper ?
Why did they quote the figure in Feet rather than in Metres ? Why did they not give an indication of , for example, how many Digital Video Discs (DVD) movie films might be stored on such hard disk space (possibly 174 or so), rather than "single typed text" ? Was it simply to produce as big a headline grabbing number as possible ?
Technorati tag: Terrorism Bill 2005