The Communications Data Bill, suggested by UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, proposes that all UK residents' mobile and Web communication should be stored by the ISPs and MSPs in a giant database for 12 months. Actual content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of e-mails and calls. However, storing information on visited websites is also mentioned, and if that's not an invasion of privacy, I don't know what is.
Smith explains the proposal thus: "Our ability to intercept communications and obtain communications data is vital to fighting terrorism and combating serious crime, including child sex abuse, murder and drugs trafficking. Communications data - that is, data about calls, such as the location and identity of the caller, not the content of the calls themselves - is used as important evidence in 95% of serious crime cases and in almost all security service operations since 2004.
But the communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we intercept communications and collect communications data needs to change too."
As pointed out by Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne, "Ministers claim the database will only be used in terrorist cases, but there is now a long list of cases, from the arrest of Walter Wolfgang for heckling at a Labour conference to the freezing of Icelandic assets, where anti-terrorism law has been used for purposes for which it was not intended."