New laws mean all phonecalls and texts must be logged
Rushda:
October 2nd, 2007
It may seem a little too Orson Well’s Big Brother for many people’s likings, but a new law has been passed which means that information from all phone calls and texts made in the UK will be stored for a year due to security reasons. This includes both landlines and mobile phones with all phone companies being obliged to provide the information. The data which is collected from these phone logs will be available to 652 public bodies which includes councils and police, and the aim is to tackle crime.
Many people feel threatened by this new law and have criticised the government for increasingly becoming a “surveillance society” day by day. However, the Home Office have insisted that the logs would only be used to tackle serious crimes such as terrorism and would not affect the general public. In fact, it is claimed that none of the actual content of the phone calls or texts would be read – only very basic information about who owns the phone and so on.
Tony McNulty, Minister for Security and Counter-terrorism, has explained that there are three levels of information the data will be providing to organisations: the phone owner details, the types of calls made and information about the whereabouts of a particular call. He says:
“Say some old lady has got difficulties with someone who’s repaired the gas in her house and has a mobile phone for somebody who’s clearly dodgy. The local authorities can just get the subscriber information next to that number. The second level of data is not simply the subscriber, but also the calls made by that phone. And the third level which is purely for the security forces, police, etc, is not just the subscriber information and the calls made, but also the calls coming in and location data – where the calls are made from.”
Critics, however, are not convinced that they will not be affected. For example, Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, has said that what was particularly concerning was how many people had access to these records, with a possibility of them being abused if something went slightly wrong. She explains:
“There are actually a very broad range of purposes for which this information about who we’ve been phoning and when can be revealed. It includes, for example, the Gaming Board, the Food Standards Authority and every district and county council in the country. We’re talking about a profile that can be built of your personal relationships on the basis of who you’ve been speaking to and when.”
McNulty reassures us all that there is no reason anyone would go “snooping” through the records, and no one has the right to do so without good reasons. The purpose is simply to prevent crime, not find out things about taxes and so on.
Personally, I like to think that if I have done nothing wrong, I have nothing to worry about. However, it is certainly a little disconcerting that so many people will be able to find out simple details about who anyone has been phoning. It may be a good system with positive intentions, but like others I am not sure how it will be ensured that the information won’t be abused.