Web Browsing Records

[Brian Beesley]

On Wednesday 12 March 2003 14:11, Roland Perry wrote:
>
> The purpose today is diagnostics. Trawling isn't viable under the
> current regime (there's just too much data and too little justification
> to hand it over very often).

What is "viable" (in this context) is entirely dependent on how much of _our_ 
money the Home Office is willing to pay for computer equipment, software and 
people to watch it watching us.

I don't think the Home Office would be in any way interested in legislating 
for the capture & retention of data they have no means of trawling. And I 
don't believe the excuse that they want diagnostic (summary, statistical and 
anonymized) information rather than full information because, if that's all 
they wanted, they would have drafted the bill that way. 

Incidentally based on my own experiences of searching log files for 
particular events the real costs (in run time etc) are dependent on how much 
data you search, not how many things you're searching for. So if e.g. you're 
looking for e-mail messages containing "Al Quaeda" because they're thought to 
be diagnostic of terrorist activity, the extra cost of logging e-mail 
messages containing "subversive" combinations such as "firefighters" and 
"strike" would be rather minimal.

Brian Beesley