OK, so here's the data retention story, which I'm going to try to write without recourse to (too much of) the EU jargon that seems to choke these sorts of things. Some is inevitable, and I apologise for that in advance.
This is the deal. The UK, France, Ireland and Sweden are trying to push a directive on data retention through into EU legislation which would force all member countries to compel all telecommunications and internet service providers to save information about the use of their services by us, the public (document 8958/2004). They say that this is for 'the purpose of prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of crime and criminal offences including terrorism', but whilst it would have far-reaching consequences, the benefits appear to be non-existent.
As Heinz Kiefer, president of the European Confederation of Police, pointed out: "The result would be that a vast effort is made with little more effect on criminals and terrorists than to slightly irritate them." (1)
The data to be saved and retained would include what is called 'traffic data', which is things like your geographical location when you make a call or switch your phone on, the telephone number you called, the duration of your call, and your user data. (Note that your phone service provider has to know where your phone is so that it can direct calls to it. Every time you move from one mobile mast cell to another, your move would be recorded.)
They wouldn't actually save the call itself, so they wouldn't know what you said, but they'd know who you spoke to, where you were when you made the call or had your phone switched on, and how long you spoke for. SMS traffic data would also be saved.
Internet communications would be similarly logged, with the IP addresses of all sites you visited being recorded, along with your MAC address (which identifies the computer you are using), username, email addresses and a logfile of every sent and received email. Quite how they are going to record you MAC address, given that it goes no further than your home router, I'm not sure, but it's in the list of data they want...
