British police see their work threatened by EU telecoms privacy directive
It is not only with the breech that the security authorities have a difficult task ahead of them to obtain data from suspects. Although the British government will probably abandon its plan to implement the key-escrow model, it is unlikely to do so. By last Thursday, the UK Department of Trade and Industry had given a mere three weeks to come up with alternative proposals on how security agencies could obtain the plain text with a court order. Presumably it will become a criminal offence not to show the police the decrypted text when needed. Now, however, the European Telecommunications Data Protection Directive, which could prohibit phone companies and providers from storing customer usage data if the information is not needed for billing purposes, is also looming.
In Germany, the Teleservices Data Protection Act has already implemented this, but in the United Kingdom, the security authorities view the implementation of this European law with suspicion due to new possibilities. If free Internet accounts, as is increasingly the case in the UK, or pre-paid cell phones meant that billing data no longer had to be collected, then the police could no longer check the Internet and cell phone use of suspects: "The new laws will have a major impact on the collection of data", The Sunday Times quotes Keith Akerman, head of the computer crime unit of the Association of Chief Police Officers, as saying. "They are not helpful to the police or the person being asked to provide the information … If the law is ratified, it will be really unfortunate. I don’t want to give criminals advice, but anyone who looks at the new law, if ratified, will get a pretty clear idea of how to plan and carry out crimes without the police being able to stop them."
So far, the British police can still obtain data from cell phone operators or providers quite easily. This does not even necessarily require judicial approval, but only the signature of a police inspector on a form.