By IANS,
London : The British government is planning to store details of phone calls, text messages, email traffic and websites visited online as part of its new anti-terror plans, The Telegraph reported.
Landline and mobile phone companies and broadband providers will be ordered to store the data for a year and make it available to the security services.
The databases would not record the contents of calls, texts or emails but the numbers or email addresses of who they are sent and received by.
For the first time, the security services will have widespread access to information about who has been communicating with each other on social networking sites such as Facebook, according to the newspaper Saturday.
The Home Office is understood to have begun negotiations with internet companies in the last two months over the plan, which could be officially announced as early as May.
The plan has been drawn up on the advice of MI5, the home security service, MI6, which operates abroad, and GCHQ, the Government’s “listening post” responsible for monitoring communications.