22 May 2008, 13:43

Home Office calls for a 'Big Brother' database

The Home Office is preparing a new Communications Data Bill to be published in draft form for pre-legislative scrutiny later this year. The bill may contain plans to create a vast consolidated database tracking all telephone calls made and all e-mails sent in the UK, over a rolling 12 month time span.

From October 2007, individual telecommunication companies have been required to retain communications data of phone calls and texts for 12 months. Communications data includes the identities of participating systems, and the dates, times and durations of connections, but not the content of messages or calls. The new Bill proposes extending the retention requirement to e-mails, internet access and VoIP calls. At present individual requests for phone and text records must be made to each telco by the authorities. Under the new proposal these records would also automatically be pooled in the central database and the police or security services would then only need to make one application for access to all the data. Such access might not even require a warrant. These initatives are prompted by a European Directive that emerged in response to the July the 7th bombings.

Quite apart from concerns over the erosion of civil liberties, given the UK government's recent record there are obvious doubts about its ability to guarantee such a system against internal misuse or external subversion. Such a scheme could also prove to be so massive as to be unworkable and, like other government database schemes, ultimately a huge waste of taxpayers' money. As an indication of the required scale, it's estimated that in the UK around 3 billion e-mails are sent every day and last year mobile text messages alone totalled 57 billion.

Assistant Information Commissioner Jonathan Bamford has commented: "This would give us serious concerns and may well be a step too far. We are not aware of any justification for the State to hold every UK citizen's phone and internet records. We have real doubts that such a measure can be justified, or is proportionate or desirable. We have warned before that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society. Holding large collections of data is always risky - the more data that is collected and stored, the bigger the problem when the data is lost, traded or stolen."

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: "Given [ministers'] appalling record at maintaining the integrity of databases holding people's sensitive data, this could well be more of a threat to our security, than a support."

Comments or questions from the public about these proposals should be directed to CommsData@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.

(Terry Relph-Knight)

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