International Law

The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009 come into force on 6th April 2009

If you search for news articles about the European Union Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC, you will, unfortunately find several articles, even from the computer and telecommunications technical press, which claim that the new mandatory requirement to store Communications Traffic Data logfiles for 12 months came into force yesterday, something which is not strictly accurate in the United Kingdom.

This Mandatory Data Retention is regardless of whether an Internet Service Provider or Telecommunications Company has any business need for this data any more , and which would therefore have been destroyed or anonymised under the Principles of Data Protection under the Data Protection Act. This data is not data identified as being useful for a particular targeted criminal investigation, but is mass surveillance snooping on the vast majority of the 450 million innocent people in the European Union.

The first part of this EU Directive, regarding landline telephones and mobile phones has already been in force in the UK since October 2007.

Remember that none of the "serious crime" or"terrorism" cases which were trotted out in support of this Data Retention policy actually involved any investigations which needed out of data communications traffic data as old as 12 months. The Soham murders investigation and the tracking of the July 2005 failed terrorist bomber who fled from London to Italy, all used current, Communications Traffic Data no more than a few days old or even in "real time", which would not yet have been deleted by the telcos in the normal course of their business anyway.

Like many other EU countries, the UK cried off from implementing the Internet aspects of the Directive for a further 18 months, which, based on the date on which the original Directive was passed, crudely puts the start data for the new scheme as the 15th March 2009 i.e.yesterday, a Sunday. - see the Official Journal of the European Union:

DIRECTIVE 2006/24/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC (.pdf)

However, the new Regulations do not appear to come into force in the UK for another 3 weeks, i.e. Monday 6th April 2009 - why the delay ? They have had at least 18 months to prepare for this date:

See the Draft Statutory Instrument, which will presumably be rubber stamped, without debate and without amendment, by being "laid" before the House of Commons and the House of Lords, sometime soon.

The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009

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Coming into force 6th April 2009

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Full post as published by Spy Blog on March 16, 2009 (boomark / email).