US Attorney General's Statements Highlight Differences Between Data Preservation and Data Retention

ISPs may have to enlarge their data warehouses if the US Attorney General has his way. During a recent closed door meeting, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller urged telecommunications representatives to store subscriber data information in their data banks and retain the data for two years, in order to assist law enforcement relating to both child pornography and terrorism. In contrast to this newly proposed data retention policy, US data preservation policies, under the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act, require ISPs to keep records of already-existing data for 90 days, if requested by the government to do so. Data retention, of the sort now being proposed, is a prospective policy relating to data not yet created. It is not clear how much information the US would want its phone companies to keep – simply customer Internet addresses, or something more comprehensive, such as Internet addresses searched for by customer. It is also unclear who would be analyzing the data and who would pay for the data warehouses. In December, the European Parliament approved tracking Internet, telephone and VoIP data. The European Data Retention Directive involves ISPs tracking both traffic and location data but not actual content for a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years. For three recent news articles (including a statement from Microsoft on the complexity of data retention), see: http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y19A3683D http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q6AA2283D; and http://news.com.com/2102-1028_3-6078229.html Summary by: Oren Weichenberg