‘Snooper’s Charter’

British officials have given their word: “We won’t read your emails.”

But experts say that its proposed new surveillance program, unveiled last week as part of the government’s annual legislative program, will gather so much data that spooks won‘t have to read your messages to guess what you’re up to.

The U.K. Home Office stresses that it is not seeking to read the content of every Britons’ communications, saying the data it was seeking “is NOT the content of any communication.” It is, however, seeking information on who’s sending the message, whom it’s sent to, where it’s sent from, and potentially other details including a message’s length and its format.

The government’s proposal is just a draft bill, so it could be modified or scrapped. But if passed in its current form, it would put a huge amount of personal data at the government’s disposal, which it could potentially use to deduce a startling amount about Britons’ private life — from sleep patterns to driving habits or even infidelity.

“We’re really entering a whole new phase of analysis based on the data that we can collect,” said Gerald Kane, an information systems expert at Boston College. “There is quite a lot you can learn.”

The U.K. government began preparing these proposals in April and an anonymous Home Office official told Britain’s The Sunday Times, “It’s not about the content. It’s about the who, what, where and when.”

This same official said it was important for law enforcement to be able to be able to obtain such data in investigations.

The ocean of information is hard to fathom. Britons generate 4 billion hours of voice calls and 130 billion text messages annually, according to industry figures. In 2008 the BBC put the annual number of U.K.-linked emails at around 1 trillion. Then there are instant messaging services run by companies such as BlackBerry, Internet telephony services such as Skype, chat rooms, and in-game services liked those used by World of Warcraft.

Communications service providers, who would log the details of all that back-and-forth, believe that the government’s program would force them to process petabytes (1 quadrillion bytes) of information every day. It’s a mind-bogglingly large amount of data on the scale of every book, every movie, and every piece of music ever released.

So even without opening emails, how much can British spooks learn about who’s sending them?

Read more here.