[jambutty]

Originally Posted by Stanaccy

I am not saying that it can't be done but I find it very hard to fathom the amount of space needed to hold 12 months of all telephone calls made to and from all landlines and mobiles in the UK.

Basic data of to whom and when yes I can accept, the actual calls, very hard to comprehend. Texts maybe.

The 652 bodies will be the local authorities, different police forces and the equivalent govt. agencies.

As Lancsdave said I believe this is hyped to stir up the libertarians.

As no calls have been used in court as evidence, apart from ones where a warrant has been issued to put a wire on, to me this ads further evidence that this is a scaremongering story.

File compression has progressed in leaps and bounds over the years so the vast amounts of space required are not quite as vast. So has the size of digital storage space and the speed of access. The files are getting smaller and the storage has been getting larger. Just look at the hard drives that you can buy these days. 500GB seems to be the norm these days and it is no larger than the old 100MB hard drive.

Take a wav file of a record at around 35MB - that can get compressed down as an MP3 file of about 3MB max. Text files are even easier to compress with even better ratios.

A telephone call is analogue sound just like a record. A text message is just like a saved file in a word processor.

It is only a matter of time before this stored ‘evidence’ will be accepted in a court of law without a warrant being issued.

The government hasn’t just put a legal time limit on it lancsdave, they are legitimising what is already happening before there is a leak or someone blows the whistle.