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Three days after the London bombings, Britain said on Sunday it would seek new
EU rules to make telecoms companies store records for much longer showing who
their customers are calling and emailing.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke said he would raise the issue on Wednesday at a
meeting of European Union interior ministers which he has called in Brussels to
discuss a joint response to the bombings by suspected Islamist militants.
"We believe that telecommunications records, whether of telephones or
emails, which record what calls were made from what number to another number
at what time, are of very important use for intelligence," Clarke told
the BBC.
"I’m not talking now about the content of any call, but the fact
that a call was made. And we believe it’s important to get a retention
of data, of what calls were made, for some considerable time."
Phone records are likely to play an important role in the probe into Thursday’s
attacks by suspected al Qaeda-linked bombers who killed more than 50 people
aboard three London underground trains and a bus.
TIME AND LOCATION
Mobile phone data show not only what numbers are connected to each other via
calls, voicemail and text messages, but also the time and the physical location
of the parties within the cell network when a given conversation took place.
Clarke did not specify how long telephone companies and Internet service providers
could be required to store data, although The Observer newspaper said the proposal
was for "several years".
Five EU governments -- Britain, Germany, Spain, France and Italy -- agreed
in principle last March that the retention period should be raised to one year.
At present, storage rules vary around Europe but records are typically kept
for about three months and destroyed after the customer has been invoiced. Retaining
them for longer would impose extra costs on telecoms providers.
European investigators have complained of cases where records have already
been deleted for data protection reasons by the time police request them. They
say this is a particular problem in complex and lengthy probes.
But keeping records for longer would meet fierce resistance from civil liberties
groups and data protection officials, particularly in countries such as Germany,
who argue this amounts to a form of Big Brother-type snooping.
"There’s no evidence that that level of national surveillance is
warranted. I believe it’s disproportionate," said Simon Davies, director
of lobby group Privacy International.
"It will result in a very high level of false accusations and unnecessary
scrutiny of people’s private communications."
