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UK government has decided to log every call, text and email of citizens by introducing a new Communications Data Bill. According to government sources this was necessary to fight terrorism and information will only be held for the first 12 months.

The bill is expected to be introduced in September.
On a question of who will have access to data, authorities said only police, law enforcement and security agencies with a court order will have access to the database. But experts have warned that this type of activity brings with it lots of responsibility and a constant threat of information being leaked.

According to assistant information commissioner Jonathan Bamford:

We have warned before that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society. Holding large collections of data is always risky. The more data that is collected and stored, the bigger the problem when the data is lost, traded or stolen.

Information Technology companies are criticizing it saying such huge kind of database would be immensely difficult to manage, would be a boon to identity thieves and would do little to counter terrorism. They also warned that this exercise will bring no results and it will be a waste of tax payers money.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis has referred to the database as more of a threat than a support in stopping crime, and Liberal Democrats have pledged to fight the moves.

Jamie Cowper, a data protection and encryption expert at PGP Corporation said:

You have to admire the government’s gall in attempting to bring in yet another ’super-database’ with public confidence still in tatters over recent data lapses. Surely it would be more logical to focus on fixing the existing databases and proving their security before introducing new ones.

Statistics show that more than 50 billion text messages and over three billion emails are sent every day in UK. This raises the question of how can this data be managed effectively.

According to Chris Dean, director at independent IT consultancy DWM Group:

The database would have to manage exponentially growing volumes of ‘unstructured’ data. The huge amount of information generated by emails, phone calls and web browsing will make the task of collating and retrieving information on demand enormous. Unless very carefully designed it could become a white elephant because of performance problems.