Government black boxes will 'collect every email'

[Chris Edwards]

Richard Clayton wrote:

| as we've discussed here before, what's content at one level of the stack
| is traffic data at the next one .... so provided your "black boxes" are
| able to pick protocols apart it's "turtles all the way down"

Yep discussed before here (and thanks for the useful insight).

  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/ukcrypto/2008-October/085585.html

I would have thought though that there's still some distinction between 
deep inspection to extract certain stuff (like the WoW virtual coords) 
then throwing away the rest, versus recording entire content.


Roland Perry wrote:

| This is not a surprise (either the fact you mention, or the conflation 
| with intercepting content). Surely the outline of this has been 
| available for years| in the Data Retention Directive. More recently in 
| the consultation:
| 
| http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2008-transposition

My reading of the consultation is basically that UK ISPs will be expected 
to retain traffic data for 12 months.  Access to this would normally be 
via a standard RIPA notice.

By contrast however, there appears to be this *other* proposal where the 
data is held in some sort of huge central govt database.  

Not sure how access to the data would be regulated.  At a guess, RIPA 
would need to be modified or replaced.

Chris