Slashdot Mirror
Broadband Bills Will Have To Increase To Pay For Snooper's Charter, MPs Warned (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes that the UK's Science and Technology Select Committee has been told that ISPs will have huge problems implementing the so-called snooper's charter, and may be forced to raise their prices. The Guardian reports: "Consumers' broadband bills will have to go up if the investigatory powers bill is passed due to the "massive cost" of implementation, MPs have been warned. Internet service providers (ISP) told a Commons select committee that the legislation, commonly known as the snooper's charter, does not properly acknowledge the "sheer quantity" of data generated by a typical internet user, nor the basic difficulty of distinguishing between content and metadata. As a result, the cost of implementing plans to make ISPs store communications data for up to 12 months are likely to be far in excess of the £175m the government has budgeted for the task, said Matthew Hare, the chief executive of ISP Gigaclear."
Good. I'm delighted to hear about this. It's high time that the cost of outrageous government snooping programs are made to fall directly on the public who ultimately vote to support this nonsense.
Oh? You're ambivalent about mass GCHQ/NSA surveillance? OK. Well it'll cost you an extra £11 a month on your telephone bill. Oh you have a problem now?.
Most people will not care about an issue until they see it hit their pocket. Therefore, I say let it.
One of the insightful points made by the head of Gigaclear is that the line between metadata and data is pretty vague. For instance, who are you calling on Skype? "Obviously" metadata .... but if someone is added to a group call in the middle of it, then suddenly metadata might be being mixed in seamlessly with voice and video data. If you post a message to a website like Slashdot that has subject lines and bodies, is the subject line metadata? And if so, how does an ISP extract that and store it separately from the body?
The real cost of this scheme isn't even in the hardware, really, it's in paying large numbers of skilled people to develop a dizzying array of Wireshark filters to try and separate and index the metadata for every imaginable internet protocol.