The folks over at Techdirt have posted an interesting article about the UK’s new email law that requires ISPs to save every single email sent in the UK for a period of one year. There are several problems with that:

There’s been an ongoing push around the world by law enforcement to require ISPs to retain certain types of data, in case it comes in handy later for criminal investigations. Of course, these demands come from the wishful thinking department. The cost associated with such data retention is tremendous, and all it does is create a huge mass of data — often making it more difficult to find the useful information. In the UK, they’ve put in place new data retention laws that will require ISPs to retain records on every email sent or received in the UK for a year. It’s not the contents of the email — but just the data on that email. That, alone, though, seems like a pretty big violation of privacy, and people are starting to point that out.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out as it doesn’t look like the law can reasonably or even legally be enforced as it stands now.