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[NEWS] UK to retain data for 12 months

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 14:27:50 -0400 From: Sarah Andrews <andrews@epic.org> Subject: [NEWS] UK to retain data for 12 months To: gilc-plan@gilc.org Send reply to: gilc-plan@gilc.org

http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?print=true&id=011017001949

SURVEILLANCE: Businesses to hold e-mail records for 12 months Financial Times, Oct 17, 2001 By THOROLD BARKER and JEAN EAGLESHAM

Businesses will be forced to retain records of e-mails and internet usage for 12 months under new anti-terrorist legislation, the government revealed yesterday. The length of the compulsory retention period - four times the three months that many internet service providers hold data at present - will add to business alarm at the cost and legal implications of the measures. "We are concerned about the costs and about what liabilities it will set up for businesses (that) may have contractual obligations with other businesses outside the UK that data is to be kept safe and not divulged," said Will Roebuck, director of E-Centre UK, an industry association. The industry concern stems in part from the uncertainty generated by the home secretary's announcement on Monday of "measures to enable communication service providers to retain data generated in the course of their business". David Blunkett's statement did not say how such providers would be defined, how long the data must be held, or who would pick up the bill. It said simply that the government would "work with the industry on a code of practice to take (the measures) forward." But any reassurance the industry derives from the assumption that a code meant the measures would be voluntary appears misplaced: the Home Office said yesterday that the measures would "have a statutory base," requiring data to be held for 12 months. It added that the government was "still working on the type of data that people will be required to keep." This will fuel industry anxiety. "Our main concerns are just who's going to be covered by this and how extensive the data retention will be," said Pamela Taylor, senior e-business policy adviser at the Confederation of British Industry. Freeserve and AOL, two of the biggest internet service providers in the UK, said they kept communication records for three months. Being forced to keep data longer than this would create practical problems. "Three months is what the law enforcement people say they need," said Camille de Stempel, director of security and networking at AOL Europe. "The issue is practical feasibility. It is not the storage of the data, but the retrieval that would be crippling." The potential battle in the UK between industry and the state may foreshadow a wider fight across Europe on the same issue, where industry has expressed concern about proposals on data retention in the draft telecommunications directive. The uncertainty over the new measures on monitoring internet traffic - when messages were sent, and to and >from which addresses - adds to the existing fog surrounding the surveillance of online content. The government is still discussing with industry the details and costing of its controversial measures to force internet service providers to install "black boxes" to allow the security services to monitor the content of e-mails.

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