Concerned after a European court ruled in favor of citizens' right to privacy, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to rush through emergency measures on Thursday and force phone and Internet companies to store call and search records for a year, according to Reuters.
The European Court of Justice ruled on a European Union directive requiring companies to store communications data for up to two years in April, but it was too broad and a threat to privacy rights, Reuters reported.
Cameron said Thursday without the emergency law, governments would be less able to protect the country from pedophiles, gangsters and terrorists, according to Reuters.
Cameron added that the UK legislation will respond to the court's concerns and provide a clear legal basis for companies to retain communications metadata such as phone call records or Internet search records, but the metadata will not include the content of the communications themselves, Reuters reported. Without such action, telecommunications providers would start deleting the information, leaving a vacuum for law enforcement agencies and intelligence services, he said.
Wiretapping phones and accessing call records for law-enforcement purposes is a decades-old practice even in the most open democracies, and with backing from courts, police can also request cooperation from telecommunications companies as they pursue criminals, according to Reuters.
"Sometimes, in the dangerous world in which we live, we need our security services to listen to someone's phone and read their emails to identify and disrupt a terrorist plot," Cameron told reporters, according to Reuters. "As prime minister, I know of examples where doing this has stopped a terrorist attack."
Data companies have also expressed concern about the debate between privacy rights and security concerns and have called for a clearer legal framework in order to cooperate with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, Reuters reported.
The European court, concerned about the lack of restrictions on how, why and when the metadata could be used, asked for a directive with more specificity on what type of crimes could be covered and how long the material would be retained, according to Reuters.
Cameron insisted the measure aimed to put into British law now that such data must be retained, rather than waiting for new EU regulations to be drawn up and risk losing the communications data between now and when the new EU law would take effect, Reuters reported.
