The rising public cost of communications surveillance

It's moderately interesting to see that the money that the Home Office spent on ‘sponsoring systems to enable communications service providers to store communications data that they are required to retain [...] or retain voluntarily’ under a couple of security-related laws has increased from £84,582.23 in 2004–5 to £10,175,527.73 in 2008-9. So public spending is about 120 times greater now than it was five years ago.

I wonder how much ‘bigger’ the communications world has grown in five years.

See Hansard for 9 July 2009. NB times, locations and people – and not content – are stated as being stored. The mandatory storage requirement comes from European Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC and not from the UK’s own legislation.