'Today' considers data retention and IMP

[John Wilson]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 4:22 PM, Paul Jakma <paul@clubi.ie> wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jan 2009, John Wilson wrote:
>
>> When the government has spent the tens of billions of pounds to install
>> the black boxes to do deep packet inspection a Gmail user
>
> Google have significant business activities in EU. What reason is there to
> think they will not comply with this directive?

Because the servers are not located in the EU and, as I understand it,
the various implementations of the Directive in the various member
states does not apply to them.

>
> Further, even if they did not comply directly with the directive, is there
> reason to think they would not comply with legal requests for logged
> information?


I'm sure that Google would comply with any valid legal request for
data. The request would have to be legal in the US, of course.

However the problem would seem to be that the authorities would like
to pour all these logs into a big database and do some pattern
matching to try to find groups of bad people. In this scenario they
are not going to be able to make individual requests the
Google/Yahoo/Microsoft, etc for UK individuals who happen to have
email accounts with them.

John Wilson