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Jacqui drops central snooping database

Burden falls to ISPs

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Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has confirmed the government is ditching the idea of a central intercept database to log all phone calls and emails sent or received by UK citizens.

Instead, internet service providers will be expected to store the data for later government use. The Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), first reported by the Reg last August, was to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on the super-database. Jacqui Smith had even found an ex-Vodafone exec, Tim Hayward, to run the project.

The burden of storing communications logs - the time, date and length of calls and emails rather than the content - will now fall on ISPs.

The Big Brother datastore has been criticised by privacy advocates. Liberty said it was a hallmark of free societies that police target criminals rather than spend time watching and monitoring the whole population.

We have a reporter at the press conference and will have more on this story shortly. ®

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Latest Comments

AC@13:54, AC@14:02

AC@13:54

Wouldn't the confidentiality of an email between myself and my MP be protected by law? How are the going to implement that?

Well since its the email header, who from and to that will be archived it probably will. However the fact you are communicating will be available. Its supposed to need a warrant to actually read the text.

AC@14:02

"they aren't going to specify exactly what they want or how it is to be stored/retrieved, just that the ISP's must provide plod with easy access to the information they require. "

Err. They did. As reported by ElReg itself with a nice link to all the stuff they want in it. It was either stuffed away in an Annex to one of these Bills or issed as a Statutory Instrument by the dept of Wackiness.

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Anonymous Coward

Protesting does work

the government is getting jittery now, and pulling away from their control systems. People are very worried about the para military style of policing that appears to dominate the UK.

But they need to do more, like resign.

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Nothing learned from 1984

Pretty sad indeed.

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