UK Email Retention Plan Technically Flawed

deltaromeo points out a BBC report calling the UK's law requiring ISPs to retain users' emails for at least a year an "attack on rights." The article also points out financial and technical flaws with the plan (which we first discussed in October). TechCrunch goes a step further, detailing how it conflicts with other governmental goals. Quoting: "...with one hand the government seeks to lock down the British Internet with an iron fist, while at the same time telling us it is boosting innovation and business online. It is quite clearly blind to the fact that one affects the other. Are we also expected to think that the consumers using online services are not going to be put off from engaging in the boom of 'sharing' that Web 2.0 created? How would you feel if every Twitter you sent, every video uploaded, was to be stored and held against you in perpetuity? That may not happen, but the mere suggestion that your email is no longer private would serve to kill the UK population's relish for new media stone dead, and with it large swathes of the developing online economy."

Comments

Doesn't happen already?

[Chris Graham]

I always pretty much assumed that anyone's net traffic would be passed through some kind of analysis, e.g. looking for certain keywords, or maybe some kind of Bayesian thing based on known 'offender patterns'. Usually I think conspiracy theories are nonsense, but in this case I think it's only to be expected that it's already happening in at least some places where packets flows through.

So I suppose the only difference here would be more is stored, but if the stuff the government is 'interested in' already was, the problem of 'false positives' possibly already existed.