By now the ISPs/Telcos had to save the data. When the directive came into action the ISPs/Telcos protested as they had additional costs nobody covered. So loop holes will not help if the data is not stored in the first place.
Unless there's some sort of "full feed copy" wiretap forwarding everything to a spy agency. Isn't this the way it's done in case of NSA and GCHQ, not by stealing archived traffic data off telecom servers?
If the ISPs already complained about extra costs, I wonder if most EU national secret agencies could pull it off on their own. Even if they had direct access, the infrastructure for the storage and querying of all (header) data of all the ISPs.
They don't all have billion dollar budgets like the NSA+GHCQ (which is the main reason I think it's fair to be infuriated with people that are okay with the global privacy breaches as long as it's not US citizens because "the secret agency in my country is doing just the same"--except they're not, they'd love to[0], but they don't have the resources to pull it off on the frankly insane and megalomaniac scale as NSA+GHCQ do).
That's the benefit of decentralizing, I guess.
[0] for the Dutch-reading HNers, in case you thought our AIVD are really basically just nice guys, check Louis Seveke's story http://www.vn.nl/Standaard-Media-Pagina/Louis-Seveke-kwelgee... (and no Seveke was absolutely no saint either, but they went too far and back in those days you had to physically tail someone, so at least it didn't scale very well)
Are there any leaks about European (except UK-GCHQ) governments spying on their citizens? By now they did not have to because it was done by the ISPs anyway.
