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<--- Text clarified on 20.11.2009--->

The Home Office's plan (known as the Interception Modernisation Programme) to put under surveillance everyone's email, mobile phone, text and Internet communications has been put on hold, following the outcomes of a consultation launched in April 2009.

At the beginning of the year, the Home Office had already given up its plans to build a central database with all information on who communicates on phone, email and Internet to whom, where, how and when. Instead, it planned to ask ISPs and phone companies to store this data for policy and security services access.

The 221 respondents to "Protecting the Public in a Changing Communications Environment", the consultation published by the Home Office that closed on 20 July, raised issues related to data protection but also to the costs involved and the technical feasibility of the project.

During the period of consultation, a briefing on the Interception Modernisation Programme issued by LSE Policy Engagement Network on 17 June, pointed out some of the main concerns related to the project. "This would lead to a tipping of the balance in favour of state power and away from communications privacy rights for the individual. In fact, the current policy environment already has incredibly weak privacy safeguards, and the Home Office is going some way to worsening the situation rather than improving it" said the briefing.

The report also emphasizes the high costs involved by such a programme due to he large amounts of traffic associated with each Internet user and the technology necessary to discard whatever appears to be "content", to combine different streams of traffic in order to obtain further information about an individual.

The statement of the Government that the system will record only information on communications and not the contents is not considered as argument if favour of the programme. The document points out that "this is as least as privacy intrusive as content interception." The gathering of this information will make possible to "create a comprehensive profile of an individual's interests, intentions, associates, usual locations, and the nature of those interactions. (...) It is a map of everyone's private life, but also his or her professional and social life too."

For the time being, the UK Government has put the programme on hold. "Any legislation requiring communications providers to keep data on who called whom, and when, will need strong safeguards on access. It is simply not that easy to separate the bare details of a call from its content. What if a leading business person is ringing Alcoholics Anonymous? There has to be a careful balance between investigative powers and the right to privacy," said Liberal Democrats home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne.

But the Home Office was still in the press' eye with a series of stories that were meant to explain the usefulness of the communication data. At least one of the five tales was heavily criticized and interpereted as distortion of an initial story. The Government claimed that the use of traffic data was essential to find a man that was lost in an area with very poor visibility on the Isle Of Lewis. But the rescuers confirmed that the Marine and Coastguard Agency (MCGA) could not use the location data, since the man was in the range of just one must. Therefore it was impossible to identify his exact position via the location data of the telecom network. "The mobile phone was most useful for keeping in contact," declared the MCGA spokesman.

Legislation to access public's texts and emails put on hold (10.11.2009)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/nov/09/home-office-plan-data-storage

Protecting the public in a changing communications environment - news (9.11.2009)
http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/news-publications/news-speeches/prot...

Protecting the public in a changing communications environment - consultation and response (6.11.2009)
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2009-communication-data/

Protecting the public in a changing communications environment - Summary of Responses to the 2009 Consultation Paper (11.2009)
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2009-communication-data/co...

Protecting the Public in a Changing Communications Environment (27.04.2009)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/27_04_09communicationsconsu...

Briefing on the Interception Modernisation Programme by LSE Policy Engagement Network (17.06.2009)
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/research/policyEng...

Home Office accused of sexing-up mobile phone rescue
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/16/imp_mobile_data/