The UK Wants ISPs to Store All of Their Traffic Data

As part of what one Member of Parliament calls “the most intrusive surveillance regime in the west,” the British government's Home Office is hoping to require ISPs to route all of the data that gets transferred over their servers through a 'black box.' In addition to spying on you, the box will also slow down everyone's connection speed. Sounds like fun.

Alright, so they say it won't spy on you, and we either know better than that, or we're just a bunch of paranoid nutjobs. Or both. Regardless, even if it doesn't spy on you, it's still open to exploitation from hackers that could put your data at greater risk than ever before. But just what is this mysterious 'black box?'

Basically, it's a scary term being used by the media to describe a device that would decrypt data as it's transmitted over the ISP's network, then separate the decrypted data from basic information like the sender and recipient, and when the information was transferred. The idea is that basic information like that will be enough to catch criminals and the like, and that the actual decrypted data can be disposed of.