Swiss ISPs must keep e-mail log for six months.

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In an attempt to intercept electronic messages relating to criminal activities, Swiss legislation was changed in January 2002 to permit e-mail surveillance, Internet service providers (ISPs) had until April 1, 2003, to comply with the technical changes required by law. Providers now are required to keep electronic logs of e-mail traffic for six months. ISPs do not log e-mail content but only basic activity data such as connection times, e-mails sent, addressees, and senders.

Since the law was changed, ISPs have been installing new data-recording technology at considerable expense. Sunrise, Switzerland's second-biggest ISP, estimates that complying with the legislation could cost it around $730,000 (U.S.). Smaller ISPs have threatened to pass on the expense to their customers.

Archiving the basic data requires a huge amount of computer storage space; doing the same for e-mail content would be impossible, experts say. After the six-month period, ISPs must delete the records, so the legislation may have little or no impact on criminals because if they are not caught within six months, the records will be destroyed. In addition, criminals would only...