U.K. Looks to Keep Records on Internet Users???

LONDON—The U.K. government could soon require Internet service companies to keep records to identify people using a particular phone or computer and hand them over to the police upon request.

The Conservative-led government says the new measures—expected to be outlined by Home Secretary Theresa May in a speech Monday—are needed to combat a growing terrorism threat and to aid the fight against online child sexual exploitation. The measure is part of a broader British effort to monitor digital communications.

Internet service providers would be required to keep track of Internet protocol addresses, though a senior government official said it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to track everybody down.

Speaking in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. televised on Sunday, Ms. May said that while the proposed bill would give authorities greater powers to trace suspects by tracking the use of IP addresses, it wouldn’t give them the right to access specific communication data, which had been outlined in the earlier bill.

“This is a step forward, but it is not all the way,” said Ms. May. “It will still be the case that the National Crime Agency … will still not be able to identify everybody who is accessing illegal content on the net.”

Several computers or devices could share an IP address, while several different people could use the same device. IP addresses, which identify internet connections based on geography, can also be masked by routing signals throughout the world, and they can also be changed.

The new plan risks raising the ire of civil liberties campaigners who dubbed an earlier bill a “snoopers charter.” That proposed law was effectively blocked by the Conservative’s co-governing partner party, the Liberal Democrats.

Ms. May said the new measures differed from those set out in the earlier bill.

Some groups that push for less government intrusion said the compromise could work.

“We need to see what this legislation would look like,” said Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, a London-based group. “As a principle it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Ms. Carr said she wanted the government to document how often the police requested the information and for what purposes, and to make sure there were proper sign-offs on its use. She said that the measure could make investigations more targeted by allowing police to zero in on suspects instead of gathering data indiscriminately.

Tom Gaffney, a consultant with Finland-based cybersecurity company F-Secure, said the proposal doesn’t work because people can hide or mask their IP addresses by routing their traffic through alternate networks around the world.

“The kind of crazy bit is it doesn’t really achieve what the government is trying to do,” he said. “There’s a lot of technical ways that customers can get around this.”