and it also comes in the same week that the police are asking for powers to hack people's personal pc's.
Obviously, if you use Easy PC Scotland for your computer support needs, even with permission, the police ain't gettin' in
Now, after that shameless plug!...
As far as I can see with this legislation for keeping all e-mails, the only details they're keeping are:
Time and Date Who it's to Who it's from There are so many things wrong with this idea, but let me touch on a few that spring to my mind:
a) E-mail is designed to be a fast technology, and as such, the security on e-mail is questionable at best. It doesn't take much for someone to set up their own email server and start sending e-mails through the Internet in a hidden manner.
b) E-mail is a cheap technology, and there are hundreds (lets just say thousands) of free email providers out there that will happily take guff information about you (firstname, surname, etc.) So how they're going to track this (and how much money/time/resources it would take to track this) is unthinkable.
c) The amount of storage that is going to be required to keep EVERY SINGLE E-MAIL for a year is unimaginable. On average, Equiphase's mail servers send out over 250 e-mails an hour. That's 3000 a day. And sometimes much much more! 1,095,000 a year. Storing all this data (even though it's just the date, to, and from fields) is going to cost... and in comparison to other ISPs, we hardly host any sites!
d) After all is said and done, and the eejits proceed to roll out such a wildly stupid requirement, what exactly are they hoping to achieve? That maybe one of the million e-mails Equiphase sends (yes, that's not the receive by the way...) is going to be from a terrorist or someone who stole a loaf of bread the other week?
Without the content of the e-mail, what's the point? They say it's to track a users whereabouts at a particular point in time, but even then, I can be anywhere and send an email from my home machine.... so that just doesn't bode well for their argument.
In conclusion, the reason for this legislation being carried on is purely on the basis that if Government weren't working in this disgusting waste of time they're calling a Law, they'd have to think of something else to be doing to earn their keep.