This let­ter was sent to Sir John But­ter­fill MP (Con­ser­v­a­tive, Bournemouth West) on 22^nd April 2009.

Dear Mr Butterfill,

The con­tent of the Government’s pro­posed Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Pro­gramme and dis­cus­sions regard­ing the cre­ation of a cen­tral gov­ern­ment data­base for record­ing inter­net traf­fic data have been brought to my atten­tion by the Open Rights Group. I am writ­ing to you to express my con­cern and to ask that, if you are in agree­ment with my points below, you oppose any such motions if and when they arise.

Firstly, the expense involved in main­tain­ing such a cen­tral data­base would be enor­mous — com­pared to the cur­rent level of infor­ma­tion the gov­ern­ment holds on its cit­i­zens, the amount of inter­net traf­fic infor­ma­tion gen­er­ated by each per­son is vast. This infor­ma­tion is cur­rently gath­ered and stored for some time by Inter­net Ser­vice Providers (ISPs), but a sin­gle cen­tral data­base would be much more expen­sive to set up, main­tain, and search. I’m sure in the cur­rent reces­sion the major­ity of Britons could name any num­ber of things they’d rather their tax rev­enue was spent on!

The sec­ond issue that con­cerns me is pri­vacy. Though this kind of data is cur­rently stored by ISPs, I do not believe civil ser­vants have free (or even easy) access to it. The Police can have access to data on spe­cific indi­vid­u­als given due cause, and I have no issues with that sys­tem. How­ever, one cen­tral data­base or easy gov­ern­ment access to exist­ing ISP data­bases implies “data min­ing” — analysing large data sets, includ­ing data from indi­vid­u­als who are not sus­pected of any wrong­do­ing, in order to pick out sus­pi­cious behav­iour. I do not believe that indi­vid­u­als who are over­whelm­ingly likely to be inno­cent ought to be rou­tinely mon­i­tored in this way.

Fur­ther­more, the more freely this infor­ma­tion moves around, the more eas­ily it can be lost or stolen or hacked into and make its way into the hands of those who could use it to steal iden­ti­ties, steal money or sim­ply sell lists of e-mail addresses to spammers.

Lastly, I do not believe that there is even an advan­tage to these plans. I’m sure the given pur­pose will once again be anti-terrorism, but I do not believe the pro­posed plans are likely to reveal any evi­dence of seri­ous ter­ror­ist activ­ity being planned. For a fairly tech-savvy user (as we must assume ter­ror­ists who con­duct oper­a­tions online are) with the moti­va­tion to do so, encrypt­ing one’s e-mail or even one’s entire inter­net traf­fic is not dif­fi­cult. This degree of inter­net traf­fic mon­i­tor­ing will only affect those inno­cent peo­ple who either don’t know how to encrypt their com­mu­ni­ca­tions, or don’t believe that they ought to have to do so just to stop their own gov­ern­ment snoop­ing on them.

Yours sin­cerely,

Ian Ren­ton