In its departmental business plan, published today, the Home Office said it aims that "key proposals [will be] implemented for the storage and acquisition of internet and e-mail records" by June 2015
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We don't exactly have the best of track records in this kind of endeavour, though. More specifically, we actively enjoy telling the EU to shove off whenever we get warned or fined for breaches of human rights as regards our data collection.
Besides, as of the end of October the brief of the project was still (sourced from the ICO's talks with David Cameron) "for mandating the collection of all possible communications data on all subscribers by all communication service providers". For a start, it's currently utterly impossible - the sheer amount of data you'd be pulling just in terms of simple URL lists would fill up hard drives faster than you could ever possibly replace them, let alone actual page data. Let's say your 30M UK internet users visit 3Mb worth of URLs and sensitive page data each day. How are you going to daily and sustainably store terabytes or even petabytes of information? How are you going to provide ISPs with the means to do so? Or are you going to shove the costs off on them? Are you going to talk with Google, with Facebook, with every country to ensure you have the go-ahead to yank data on their subscribers without the subscriber's say-so?
Furthermore, that brief doesn't, to me, seem like anything close to 'good reason' and more like 'completely insulting'. Official warranted requests for access logs in the case of suspicion? Great. Wiretapping of suspects? Sure, okay, I find it kind of skeevy if done silently, but it's roughly where I can draw the line for decency vs. criminal-catching. Intercepting the communication data of ~30 million people, innocent or guilty, on the assumption they've done something wrong? Sod that. I would really rather be in a country that gives me a little credit rather than spending time and much-needed-elsewhere money looking over my shoulder 24/7. We've had enough stories about students getting arrested for researching essays on terrorism - that is to say, more than none - that I have absolutely no faith in what will be done with this data.
Besides, as of the end of October the brief of the project was still (sourced from the ICO's talks with David Cameron) "for mandating the collection of all possible communications data on all subscribers by all communication service providers". For a start, it's currently utterly impossible - the sheer amount of data you'd be pulling just in terms of simple URL lists would fill up hard drives faster than you could ever possibly replace them, let alone actual page data.
Let's say your 30M UK internet users visit 3Mb worth of URLs and sensitive page data each day. How are you going to daily and sustainably store terabytes or even petabytes of information? How are you going to provide ISPs with the means to do so? Or are you going to shove the costs off on them? Are you going to talk with Google, with Facebook, with every country to ensure you have the go-ahead to yank data on their subscribers without the subscriber's say-so?
Furthermore, that brief doesn't, to me, seem like anything close to 'good reason' and more like 'completely insulting'. Official warranted requests for access logs in the case of suspicion? Great. Wiretapping of suspects? Sure, okay, I find it kind of skeevy if done silently, but it's roughly where I can draw the line for decency vs. criminal-catching. Intercepting the communication data of ~30 million people, innocent or guilty, on the assumption they've done something wrong? Sod that. I would really rather be in a country that gives me a little credit rather than spending time and much-needed-elsewhere money looking over my shoulder 24/7. We've had enough stories about students getting arrested for researching essays on terrorism - that is to say, more than none - that I have absolutely no faith in what will be done with this data.
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