Home Office begins work on comms data

Home secretary Jacqui Smith has said her department already has a team working on how it obtains communications data.

This comes before the the government has begun the consultation on a proposed parliamentary bill that would enable it to gather communications data for policing and national security purposes.

"We have brought together a team to look at some of the technical solutions around what it might be necessary to do, precisely in order to be able to inform the consultation, so that work of course is ongoing," Smith told parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights on 28 October.

She has promised to produce a consultation paper in the new year before drawing up a bill.

One option for gathering communications data — information about telephone calls, emails and other forms of communication, rather than the content — is reportedly a single database run by the government. Currently, such data is retrieved from service providers only when required by the police and intelligence services.

Smith defended the need to change the arrangements on gathering such data, saying it was used in 95 percent of serious organised-crime convictions and nearly all security-service operations since 2004, and that the technology and usage was changing.

"Law enforcement and intelligence agencies tell me [it is] fundamentally important for ensuring that convictions are fulfilled and that we keep the country safe in the way in which we want to," she said.

"But if we face a situation as a government where both technology and our use of technology means that some of our most important capability that law-enforcement uses at the moment is likely to be eroded, then we have to consider what is the most appropriate way to deal with that technologically, number one, and what are the appropriate legal safeguards to put around the way in which we deal with that in the future," she added.