The authorities have had access to telephone call data records for about 30 years now. in a market-led, profit driven tech industry the real issue isn’t the politics but the costs of storing this data for the Govt and who pays for it. The national Government in some form or other is often one of the biggest customer of a telecoms company and has commercial as well as political power – even local Councils dangle the carrot of easy access to planning permission and lucrative long term contracts to get areas equipped with NTL cable as consumer internet isn’t as profitable (both Reading and Ipswich have done this).
it is clearly worthwhile the telephone company storing details of what numbers are dialled as they use them to generate the bill!
As on the Internet we are not normally billed at ISP level for each individual piece of content access its an extra non-profit generating job for the ISP to store loads of data, even if the routers can capture it.
When commercial pressures dictate companies tend to cave in (such as RIM allowing all sorts of dodgy foreign régimes access to Blackberry emails in return for the devices being permitted by a country’s communications ministry).
At every point there is the human factor, making the issues with technology irrelevant. Anyone in a chain of information might decide to blow the whistle to authorities or media anyway for either personal profit or principles..
