Posted on Wednesday 14 December 2005
The register reports about a new proposal passed in the EU Parlimant.
The European Parliament has approved proposals on data retention that would compel telecom firms to keep customer email logs, details of internet usage and phone call records for between six months to two years.
The plan - designed to assist law enforcement in the fight against terrorism and serious crime - leaves it up to individual governments to decide how long service providers will be obliged to keep data.
It is vital to understand that any data stored on a remote server has been backed up and now forcibly retained by governments in the EU for at least 6 months but probably 2 years or more, depending on the country and ISP.
The obvious solution is public key encryption, and we will soon detail the available e-mail encryption and IM encryption solutions.