The Telegraph and Guardian reported yesterday that the government plans to install deep packet inspection kit at ISPs, a move considered and then apparently rejected by the previous government (our Database State report last year found their Interception Modernisation Programme to be almost certainly illegal). An article in the New York Times on comparable FBI/NSA proposals makes you wonder whether policy is being coordinated between Britain and America.
In each case, the police and spooks argue that they used to have easy access to traffic data — records of who called whom and when — so now people communicate using facebook, gmail and second life rather than with phones, they should be allowed to harvest data about who wrote on your wall, what emails appeared on your gmail inbox page, and who stood next to you in second life. This data will be collected on everybody and will be available to investigators who want to map suspects’ social networks. A lot of people opposed this, including the Lib Dems, who promised to “end the storage of internet and email records without good reason” and wrote this into the Coalition Agreement. The Coalition seems set to reinterpret this now that the media are distracted by the spending review.
We were round this track before with the debate over key escrow in the 1990s. Back then, colleagues and I wrote of the risks and costs of insisting that communications services be wiretap-ready. One lesson from the period was that the agencies clung to their old business model rather than embracing all the new opportunities; they tried to remain Bletchley Park in the age of Google. Yet GCHQ people I’ve heard recently are still stuck in the pre-computer age, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing. As for the police, they can’t really cope with the forensics for the PCs, phones and other devices that fall into their hands anyway. This doesn’t bode well, either for civil liberties or for national security.
