EU email laws breach privacy

We read:

"From March, ISPs will have to keep data about emails sent and received in the UK for a year in an EU-wide bid to tackle terrorism. They would have to be able to provide the timing and number of communications from individuals, but not their content. It follows a ruling last October that telecoms companies should keep records of phone calls and text messages for 12 months About 57 billion text messages were sent in Britain last year, while an estimated three billion emails are sent every day.

Parliament approved the powers, described as a vital tool against terrorism, last July under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. The law is being implemented as part an EC directive, and the Government will reportedly have to pay the ISPs more than o25 million to ensure it is obeyed.

Dr Richard Clayton, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge's computer lab said the costs of the regulation could have been better spent. He told the BBC: "There's going to be a record of every single email which arrived addressed to you and all the emails you sent out via your ISP. "That of course includes all the spam. "There are much better things to do to spend our billions on than snooping on everybody in the country just on the off chance that they're a criminal."

The Earl of Northesk, a Conservative peer on the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, said it meant anyone's movements could be traced 24 hours a day. He told the broadcaster: "This degree of storage is equivalent to having access to every second, every minute, every hour of your life. "People have to worry about the scale, the virtuality of your life being exposed to round about 500 public authorities. "Under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, privacy is a fundamental right, it is important to protect the principle of privacy because once you've lost it it's very difficult to recover."

The Home Office said the data would be useful for combating crime. A spokesman said: "Communications data is crucial for the police to be able to investigate and identify criminal suspects by examining their contacts, establish relationships between conspirators and place them in a specific location at a certain time. "The data retained is not the content of emails but only the email addresses and times they were sent. "Implementing the EC Directive will enable UK law enforcement agencies to benefit fully from historical communications data in increasingly complex criminal and terrorist investigations and will enhance our national security."

Source

Forget freedom of speech in your own home. I have no real idea why, but I get heaps of email from Muslim sources. I delete them all immediately but the Brits would no doubt have me fingered as a terrorist sympathizer on the basis of what is described above. That could give me a torrid time if ever I landed at a British airport.