12 July 2005
UK seeks all-EU traffic data retention
SA Mathieson
The UK will tomorrow ask other EU countries to implement standardized
periods of retention for communications traffic data, for the purposes
of investigating terrorism and other crime.
Such a move could be expensive for internet service providers in
countries where such data is not currently retained, such as Germany,
but also in the UK, where a voluntary code applies.
The UK is proposing European legislation introducing a minimum compulsory
standard similar to its voluntary code of practice. This asks telcos
and internet service providers to retain traffic data for six to
12 months.
The proposal will be discussed at a meeting of interior ministers
in Brussels tomorrow afternoon, under the Justice and Home Affairs
Council of the European Union. This was called by Charles Clarke,
the UK home secretary (interior minister), following last Thursday’s
bomb attacks in London. He is currently president of the council,
as part of the UK’s EU presidency.
Traffic data excludes the contents of communications, but includes
email header information, web-sites visited, telephone numbers called
and the approximate location of mobile telephones when calls are
made. Telecoms firms tend to retain such data for several months
for billing purposes, whereas internet service providers have no
such need.
EU countries vary widely in their approach to traffic data retention.
Denmark and Germany impose no obligation, Italy retains telephone
records but not internet data and Ireland insists that it is all
retained for three years. "What we’re hoping to do in
our presidency is to bring in minimum standard, probably six to
12 months like us", says a UK spokesperson.
Richard Clayton, a researcher at Cambridge University’s computer
laboratory, says such legislation would cost a lot for UK internet
service providers as well as German ones, as the voluntary code
means traffic data is often kept on a 'best efforts' basis, meaning
that a disk failure holding a day’s logs is just a matter
of regret, back-ups are not taken, and many ISPs keep far less traffic
data than the six months recommended in the voluntary code for email
traffic data.
But if keeping logs is compulsory, this will require them to be
stored in a much more rigorous — and expensive — fashion.
“There’s an order of magnitude of difference,”
says Clayton.
The UK Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa) said
that its members have already responded to a request to retain all
kinds of data made by the National High-tech Crime Unit on the day
of the terrorist attacks: it did something similar on September
11 2001. “Retaining data that is of no use to criminal investigations
will make the extraction of vital evidence even harder,” Ispa
said.
© SA Mathieson
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