Phone Call Database

[sleepyhead]

BBC NEWS | UK | Phone calls database considered

Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged.

Am I right in feeling worried about this?

[TiG]

It will never work. The government can't get any large scale IT solution right. It would just be billions of wasted tax paying pounds and it will end up with nothing working.

EDIT: But actually thinking about it a bit closer this already exists, in the nature of peoples bills for telephone usage. Just bring the bills together and you end up with who called who and when and for how long.

TiG

[eshrules]

Originally Posted by TiG

It will never work. The government can't get any large scale IT solution right.

even if they could, they'd only end up losing it

[Sinizter]

Scary ****. If it came into force it would make me seriously consider leaving this country.

[0iD]

BBC NEWS | UK | Phone calls database considered

The Big Brother state is coming!

Originally Posted by News.BBC

Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged.

The plans, reported in the Times, are at an early stage and may be included in the draft Communications Bill later this year, the Home Office confirmed.

[rastamanblues]

Wouldnt this also be a storage nightmare? Any rough figures on how much space would be needed?

[eshrules]

Originally Posted by rastamanblues

Wouldnt this also be a storage nightmare? Any rough figures on how much space would be needed?

I don't know, but I'd hate to be the one to cop for all the filing!

[Mike Fishcake]

Stand back, i'm going to try extremely vague maths!

From this page, it's claimed that there were 234,000,000,000 minutes worth of phone calls in the UK in 2006. 641,095,890 minutes per day.

Third of all UK calls are made from mobiles

OK, let's assume they're not worried about quality, so I'm going to estimate at a 32kbps bitrate for phone calls. For the sake of easiness, that's near 4 minutes per megabyte.

Which equals 160,273,972 MiB, or nearly 153TiB per day.
1069TiB per week, or just over 1 PiB.
55,637TiB per year. Just over 54 PiB.

It's incredibly vague I know, but I think I've worked that out mostly correctly.

[chicken]

Originally Posted by sleepyhead

Am I right in feeling worried about this?

But just think of all the terrorists they'll catch with teh new technologies!

[TiG]

It doesn't say it is going to record all calls. It says to have details of all calls. Details to me is time call made, to who, from who, for how long.

Thats no where near that requirement for storage.

All the information to do this is available in the records for telephone bills, all telephone companies would just need to provide itemised bills for the government for everyone and they'd have the information they are after.

As for 32kbps, Mike you do realise that telephone lines run at 8k, save in the right format and you are looking at no more than 4kbps with perfectly adequate quality to listen to what was said.

TiG (well versed with call recording systems as he's installed many for company compliance)

[Lee @ SCAN]

Damn...

I better stop ringing those 0891 numbers then

[javalord]

I believe "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1759) applies here.

Off the shelf security packages (such as OpenVPN) arent very hard to configure for someone with a bit of experience, so all this will do is force the issue underground as usual. Clever government...

I agree with those above, in economic times like this, I dont see this going through entirely nevermind the lack of success such projects have had in the past. Starting to think its more of a distraction for something else.

[Mike Fishcake]

Originally Posted by TiG

As for 32kbps, Mike you do realise that telephone lines run at 8k, save in the right format and you are looking at no more than 4kbps with perfectly adequate quality to listen to what was said.

Nope! Didn't know that. Ta!

[pauldarkside]

I reckon this is all a cunning plan (Baldrick-style) to get us to return to writing letters and using Royal Mail - it's struggling and needs the cash this would create

I say we all start keeping pigeons instead

[Main]

Originally Posted by chicken

But just think of all the terrorists they'll catch with teh new technologies!

At least they'll know for sure whether they're going for A or B...

[DavidM]

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