Privacy International claims that the UK government has (per year) demanded personal data concerning more than 100 million phone calls, subscriber data on roughly one million consumers and an unknown quantity of email and Internet logs:

The data, to be unveiled today at Scrambling for Safety 6 at the London School of Economics, is based on estimates supplied by the Home Office, Ministerial statements, legal experts, the communications industry and the All Party Internet Group of MP's, and according to Privacy International director Simon Davies is "very much on the low side... We literally halved the Home Office estimate... just to be on the safe side."

The organisation reckons that the information seized could total a billion individual items of data, including credit card numbers, dialled numbers and location data from mobile phone service providers.

So what's the problem? Well, despite the Home Office approving all of this, it's actually done in defiance of the Data Protection Act and without legal authority.

Anybody concerned about it should note THIS page at Privacy International, which allows you to (hopefully) find out just what the government has of yours.

Just as well then that campaigners opposed to such data retention are all meeting today at the London School of Economics - 'Scrambling for Safety 6'. More @ The Register.