International Law

Communications Data Retention - internet access, internet e-mail and internet telephony

Chapter 46, The Bastion Saint-Gervais, The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, 1844 - text available online via Project Gutenberg:

"But why did we not breakfast at the Parpaillot?"

"Because we have very important matters to communicate to one another, and it was impossible to talk five minutes in that inn without being annoyed by all those importunate fellows, who keep coming in, saluting you, and addressing you. Here at least," said Athos, pointing to the bastion, "they will not come and disturb us."

"It appears to me," said d'Artagnan, with that prudence which allied itself in him so naturally with excessive bravery, "that we could have found some retired place on the downs or the seashore."

"Where we should have been seen all four conferring together, so that at the end of a quarter of an hour the cardinal would have been informed by his spies that we were holding a council."

"Yes," said Aramis, "Athos is right: animadvertuntur in desertis."

"A desert would not have been amiss," said Porthos; "but it behooved us to find it."

"There is no desert where a bird cannot pass over one's head, where a fish cannot leap out of the water, where a rabbit cannot come out of its burrow, and I believe that bird, fish, and rabbit each becomes a spy of the cardinal. [...]"

During the Parliamentary summer recess / news "silly season" the Home Office are going through the motions of Yet Another Public Consultation.

This one is entitled: Consultation: Transposition of Directive 2006/24/EC (.pdf - 47 pages)

This title seems to be deliberately obscure, but it is in effect about the planned increase in Mandatory Data Retention of Communications Data . This follows on from the European Commission's "policy laundered" Mandatory Data Retention scheme, which affects the 450 million people in the European Union states, but which was steered through the EU bureaucracy by the then British Home Secretary Charles Clarke, during pne of the the UK's 6 month turns at the presidency of the EU.

Several of the larger EU countries cried off fully implementing this scheme for 18 months, but they all implemented the bits dealing with conventional landline telephones and faxes, and mobile phones, as of 1st October 2007 - see SI 2007 No. 2199 ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2007

Included in the Consultation Document is a new Draft Statutory Instrument, which rolls up all the provisions of that SI 2007 No. 2199, and adds in the vague terms "internet access" and "internet e-mail" and "internet telephony", without clarifying exactly what they mean in detail.

N.B. there is no Data Retention of web site URL visits under this proposed implementation of the European Commission scheme,

However, that does seem to be the way in which the Home Office is dreaming, as part of the Interception Modernisation Programme

See The Register - UK.gov to spend hundreds of millions on snooping silo and, back in July, when Information Commissioner mildly criticises the Home Office's centralised communications traffic database plan

We have heard from people who have attended Home Office briefings to ISPs and Telcos, and they really do seem to imagine that they can inflict a massive secret database, which includes the content of emails etc. as well as the Communications Data logfiles, and that they can get industry to pay for most of it.

Full post as published by Spy Blog on August 28, 2008 (boomark / email).