Industry slams cost of UK snooping bill

Critics have slammed an independent report into the UK government's proposed communications snooping bill which puts an estimated £34m price tag on the bill's implementation.

The proposed Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill, which has been the subject of much debate, will require ISPs to provide facilities to intercept emails - or future electronic communications formats - for surveillance organisations such as the police.

Industry think tank the Foundation for Information Policy Report (FIPR) claimed that the brunt of the £34m implementation would be met by ISPs and taxpayers.

The government had previously said it may cover "marginal" costs associated with the Bill and has denied reports that costs would be high.

The 72-page report, compiled by the Smith Group for the Home Office, recommends three schemes for intercepting traffic on the internet: an "active" scheme, which intercepts only email at an ISP's server, and "semi-active" and "passive" schemes, which are two ways of intercepting all of an individual's traffic, including email, web browsing and voice over IP.

The Smith Group recommends that all ISPs will have to deploy the email interception scheme and estimates that it will cost a large ISP £113,000 in the first year and £44,700 each year thereafter. A small ISP will pay $44,700 in the first year and £19,400 each year thereafter, says the group.

The costs are split equally between the government and industry, but FIPR said that with an estimated 400 ISPs in the UK, this works out to some £17m in the first year.

FIPR said it estimates that the total first year cost of using the passive or semi-active schemes to intercept the traffic at the 20 largest UK ISPs will be at least another £17m. Adding the email interception that the report recommends will make the total cost to the economy in excess of £34m.

Caspar Bowden, FIPR director, said: "The government has been telling us for weeks that the million-pound price tags put on interception were just scaremongering. Now its own consultants think it will be more than £30m and that's only the beginning, before the next wave of broadband ecommerce is rolled out in 2001, with third generation mobile internet following in 2002."

"It also does not take into account the cost to the tax payer of processing and safeguarding the intercepted material, or answer the basic question of whether interception will continue to be useful for law enforcement as encryption becomes widely used for personal and business applications."