Government wants ISPs to collect correspondence data

The Government has ruled out creating a super database of people’s emails, phone calls, text messages and internet usage, and said it is looking at other ways to store this information.

The proposal for a centralised database was first put forward last year to form part of the Interception Modernisation Programme (Communications Data Bill). The raison d’être was to help police and authorities tackle crime and terrorism, but such was the outcry about the Government snooping and prying it has now been dropped.

In a consultation paper released today, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the Government..."recognises the privacy implications in holding all communications data from the UK in a 12-month period in a single store. The Government therefore does not propose to pursue this approach".

However Miss Smith said that "doing nothing…is also not an option" because access to the data was crucial in the fight against crime and terrorism. She has therefore come up with a plan to get communications companies such as internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile phone companies to gather, process and store the data.

She said that the data gathered would not be about content: "Communications data is information about a communication not the content of that communication.

"For a given telephone call, communications data can include the telephone numbers involved, and the time and place the call was made, but not what was said.

"For an email it might include the email address from which the message was sent, and to where it was sent, but not the content of the message.

Richard Clayton, a privacy expert at Cambridge University said the proposals remained a "super snooping scheme... and a shocking waste of money", which made no more sense than the original proposals.

"The Government seems to have bottled out from proposing a central communications database, because it is easy for anyone to understand how disproportionate it would be.

"But they are still proposing to force the ISPs and phone companies to record all the details about every website visit, every instant message, every tweet and every glance at a Facebook page.

"Such a scheme is even less proportionate, and as soon as their opaque descriptions of what they intend are understood, they will be wondering why they didn't give up on this demented idea as well," he said.

The Internet Service Providers’ Association said it was "committed to assisting law enforcement agencies in the investigation of serious crimes and threats to national security". However, it would be asking the Home Secretary for clarification about what the proposals entailed when it met her in May.