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Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm afraid I don't share your cynicism of the aims of government. Like it or not, surveillance techniques are vital for law enforcement: eg the arrest of the chaps who attempted to bomb the London Underground a couple of years ago was almost entirely down to CCTV and tracking mobile phones. The police NEED such facilities as the internet becomes used more and more by terrorists and organised crime.
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Like HarryT, I tend to mostly trust the intention's of today's government. I expect I will trust the next one as well. However, who knows what will happen in future years?
Also, whilst I trust the intention of the government, I am not sure that I entirely trust all the police not to abuse the powers they are being given, and to only use them where they are not intended, especially given some of the developments of late. (Note: again generally I think the police are perfectly honest and work with the spirit of the law, but a few do abuse their powers, and I am reluctant to give them excessive powers without being sure they are justified and appropriately controlled.)
Any law like this is a trade-off; I'm concerned that a tradeoff worthwhile for, say mass-murdering terrorism, isn't worth it if it ends up, say, stopping people protesting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's no different to the phone company keeping records of who you make calls to, and those records being available to the police with a court order. This has always been done, and most people would accept that this does not constitute "treating you like a criminal".
As the internet replaces the telephone for many everyday communications, it seems emminently reasonable to me that e-mails should be "logged" in the same way that telephone calls are - and always have been.
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There are differences between email and phones -- I can get lots of spam emails from very dodgy sources. It is also possible that the likes of viruses may infect my machine and send emails to dodgy sources. Generally this doesn't happen on the phone. People need to understand
Quote:
Originally Posted by deltop
How exactly is this going to catch criminals? Or even help catch them?
Anyone up to anything even remotely dodgy will be running their own smtp server (for sending emails) and pop3/imap server for receiving them. Meaning their emails won't appear in any logs. All isp's can do is monitor their own servers which a potential terrorist or criminal will NOT be using.
Even using any standard free webmail sevice based outside of the eu will mean they can't monitor your emails.
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As HarryT has mentioned, traffic analysis would, I guess, show a lot of interesting things. Operating an SMTP server would not "hide" what you are doing as the data is still carried over the network, and I guess they can pick up the traffic as it flows across the network, identifying where the data is going.
That said all that, what do I think of the trade-off? Well, since all they are storing is just who the messages are sent/received from, and they claim they have safeguards in place, I don't see a real problem with the law at present. It does seem much the same as they have for the telephone. And I can always just write a letter if I want (I'm sure I have a pen somewhere in my house....)
What intrgiues me is given how automated the postal services are now, that they don't require them to keep logs of every item delivered, related to the point it entered the postal system....