Dropsafe

Q653 Lord Faulks: […] Very briefly, I detect that one of the real problems for all your organisations is the uncertainty and quite what it will mean in commercial and cost terms if the Bill becomes law. Have you made some estimate in your own minds as to what the costs will be? Bearing in…

Q651 Lord Strasburger: […] My question is: what does the wholesale retention of communications data over a period of 12 months do to enhance law enforcement and all the other agencies who want to get this? The message I am getting from the whole panel is that apart from, perhaps, some Facebook accounts that might…

Ad terrorem Q649 Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: It seems to me that, at least on behalf of all the over- the-top services, the power for UK CSPs to collect your stuff as it goes over them is actually not useful. Would that be fair? So one then asks oneself, “Why is it in the Bill?”.…

Q636 Lord Strasburger: I am still in search of this elusive 25%. If representatives from the Home Office were here today—and we asked them—they might say that telephony was not all on landlines or even on mobile phones but is now over the internet, and they might point at Skype or Tor as developments that…

(like I didn’t call this one) Q635 The Chairman: But if people are to comply with the Bill, you as service providers cannot introduce a new service and then wait a few months or a couple of years for the DPI technology to catch up. Would you be under an obligation not to launch your…

Q630 Baroness Cohen of Pimlico: We are wondering what the implications would be of requiring a British-based CSP to store some of your data that go across it. Are you suggesting that your reaction would at the very least be to encrypt to protect your customers? Colin Crowell: I do not know how we would…

Colin Crowell: We probably get fewer requests for user data than some of the other services, only because the nature of Twitter is that most of what happens there is already public anyway. Law enforcement oftentimes simply has to go to the web on its own and can obtain the relevant Tweets that they were…

Q623 Dr Huppert: Mr Murdoch has been a bit silent so far. Tor has a slightly different relationship to this. What would be the consequences of this Bill on your operations? Are there specific consequences that you would have directly? Steven Murdoch: In some sense that is difficult to say, because the Bill does not…

Q619 The Chairman: […] If 30 million British subjects are held on a server in the States, do I understand the Patriot Act and others correctly in thinking that American authorities, whether the NSA or the FBI, would then have the right to say that they wanted access to anything on an American computer? Simon…

Q618 The Chairman: So if I or any other British citizen sent a message to friends in Switzerland or the United States and it is contrary to Swiss or United States law to store it, you would have to develop a system whereby you stored only my half of the message? Simon Milner: That is…

ref: session 2: Simon Milner: Yes. In our case, we were asking questions in particular about the data retention proposals and what the Home Office had in mind on what that might mean for Facebook. It explained that to us that the Home Office envisaged that there would be a retention order on Facebook to…

Via Andrew Watson of FIPR; I want to check the final session details, the names clash surprisingly. On 8th October the Communications Data Bill Committee published transcripts of some oral evidence taken in private from various communications providers. There are one or two redactions, but the evidence seems largely complete. Worth a look for those…