Seeing as "The Government Pays" translates as the Tax Payer pays (we seem to be to doing a lot of that keep private business sweet these days...) do we get money off from our ISP's or do they work it out so that we only pay for the proportion of OUR data held with OUR ISP? Of course not, we bend of the table, trousers athwart ankles and take it like a good citizen.....freemarket economy indeed!

EUDRD says

"Member States shall adopt measures to ensure that data retained in accordance with this Directive are provided ONLY to the competent national authorities in SPECIFIC cases..."

So you depart from that, even if Jacqui assures you it's legal, then you are liable. Although bypassing Parliament to get the bill through should be a dead giveaway that it's not legal.

I don't actually see how any of this information could ever be of any real use... I mean my machine must make 100,000s of connections a day to different things (you should watch bittorrent light peerguardian up like a mother f---ing christmas tree, as do most websites as aids monsters run off and try and connect your ass to dodgy ad servers.)

I mean really... at least with a phone line you normaly need to be on one end of it to make or receive a call.

Does this mean that they are off the off ? Was phorm nothing more than a secret gov trial ??

Do I count as an ISP if I have my own email server? What if I let other people use it? Who is responsible then? Please help.

If ISPs must store emails and other comms, how does this work with web mail? I never send mail from my PC, it's all done through a web mail service based outside the UK. Surely they can't see my emails that way, so all they'd be getting is when I connected to the web site.

If I were a terrorist I wouldn't be using my ISPs POP3 account and Outlook Express to plan my nefarious activities.

Surely, this is the UK.gov paying lip service to the EU until they get their £12bn uberdatabase up and running and then they will just put in data collection black boxes on to any and all ISPs and suck the data off themselves, thereby not needing any help from the ISPs and thereby generating "cost savings" in not paying ISPs to do it.

Chin, chin, drinks all round and off to the golf course!

So, I host a few domains for people/companies. Is there a definition of an ISP, I'm guessing that's a loose term for 'email provider'?

"Was phorm nothing more than a secret gov trial ?"

It was certainly convenient. It showed up likely areas of resistance and tested the sensitivity of the general public to the prospect of wholesale surveillance: jolly useful for the government spinmongers.

It would be interesting to know how many comments there were in forums opposing Phorm which included something like, "... but of course I don't object to monitoring by the government ... [to stop 'terrists' etc.]." I noticed a few and wondered if they were made by stooges or whether trolls alone are sufficient to cloud the civil liberties debate.

EU Retention Data Directive* (EURDD)

it's lucky that the E.U hasn't been renamed to "Tyrannical Union", then.

I'm confused!

Just what sort of data are they talking about?

And are they going to want all the Spam as well?

The thrust of the article is that the government is saying it WONT be imposing an odious and expensive directive from the EU to retain data and you are STILL complaining of a police state in progress.

You really can't please people.

This is going to be one hell of an interesting law, "An offence has been committed if the internet service provider does not hold data on internet activity on its customers for 5 years after said activity has taken place and the gross turnover of the internet service provider is greater than 5 million pounds sterling".

I guess the bastards will have to link the turnover amount to inflation.

A legal f**ng nightmare.

We need these Labour morons out.

"TSurely, this is the UK.gov paying lip service to the EU until they get their £12bn uberdatabase up and running and then they will just put in data collection black boxes on to any and all ISPs and suck the data off themselves" thereby not needing any help from the ISPs and thereby generating

They don't need the data collection devices: they already have it, it's called NSA at RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. It's common knowledge what goes on there, so it's believed.

Admittedly, being able to data mine themselves would make things easier for the British government. They seem to be doing quite a good job of interceping people's internet traffic so far, look how many cases have been bought before the courts recently.

but of course I don't object to monitoring by the government ... [to stop 'terrists' etc.]."

Nothing wrong with monitoring for that kind of purpose, the issue is that it will be abused. Almost guaranteed. That's what happens with governments and interceptions around the world.

And what worries me further, is requirements creep, the database is going to prove useful to a lot of government agencies when that data is combined with data from other databases. The government will claim this will never happen, but you know full well it will. And some b**stard official will allow the operators of the database to sell some elements of the data to any tom dick or harry that wants it, just in the same way the DVLA does now, to make a fast buck.

The data will be moved around from place to place and some tosser will lose a DVD or magnetic tape of.

The operations staff will end up being bribed into doing searches of any future would be politician/senior party official, the dirt being digged up and leaked to the press to destroy their career.

"The larger broadband providers typically already store the data covered by the EUDRD for billing purposes. Their extra costs will derive from servicing law enforcement requests for access. The problem, the Home Office official revealed last week, is that paying for small ISPs - who often have less sophisticated records systems by default or by design..."

This is bollocks. I'll tell you how it will work. There will be 19" racks installed at the ISPs network centres with tons of hard drives logging all the internet traffic, or certainly URL addresses and all email traffic. The IP address will accompany it, what is then needed is the customer record details, name, address etc and the time of all IP addresses assigned to the user so that they can identify who really was accessing a particular URL at a particular time.

The 19" rack wil will have its own fibre link to it providing a backdoor route in for government agencies to search and extract the data they need over the existing ISP's infrastructure and a high encrypted secure link. No human involvement at all.

This isn't going to be a case of a government agency contacting the ISP and submitting a request for the information. This is the information world and it's achievable right now.