"mandatory for people’s internet information to be kept readily available for investigation – for at least 12 months."

FFS 'investigation' of what, spelling mistakes/bad grammar/wrong coloured ink/type size/background colours/bad breath/illegal parking/dropping fag ends/overfilling wheely bins,wrong coloured undies, etc etc ?? zzzzzzzzzzzzz

You really just have to laugh at these regulators/ministers, they really don't have a clue...

Do they have any idea how much data that would be? Do they have any idea just how useless it would be?

As I'm sure the word "terrorist" is being used to justify yet another invasion of privacy, do they think Mr Terrorist won't be talking on a "secure" channel... Many IM clients do encryption already, so you can't even assume encrypted equals naughty.

And then there is VOIP, even if not encrypted, it is a voice stream, so huge amounts of 1s and 0s containing very little information... A 1000 character email read out as spoken words on a VOIP connection is going to weigh in in the megabytes region.

On the plus side it will of course mean that Seagate, Western Digital et al will be bunging loads of time and money into research to invent the technology required to store these kind of volumes, so I look forward to the £50 100TB 3.5" HDD arriving in the next couple of years.

Lets have a Trial Run for 12 months:-

Every individual in Official Positions (MPs, Qangos, Councillors etc) to have ALL their personal communications made public.


obviously the public have far too much freedom and liberty

as ill-informed belligerent bigots it is their duty to put a stop to it!