EU Approves Data Retention

submanifold writes "The EU have ratified rules that will force ISP's and other telecommunication companies to retain data for two years. This data includes the time, date and locations of both mobile and landline calls (as well as whether or not they were answered) along with logs of internet activity and email. Apparently the content itself would not be accessible, merely the data concerning it. However, despite being touted as an anti-terrorist measure, the record industry has already admitted interest in aquiring such data."

Re:I am going to be rich!

[burnetd]

I'm off to patent the use of random RIAA artist names, and MPAA movie names in email signatures.

Re:This story belongs in "Your Rights Online"

[Volanin]

With this amount of information to be stored?
You might change your mind after a few months...

Exemptions for individuals

[adnonsense]

European individuals can gain exemptions from having their data retentioned if they sign a waiver giving away all rights to their first-born to the audio-video retail industry.

Those without children may instead put their signature at the bottom of a blank terrorist confession sheet and mail it to their local secret service. This will also automatically enter them into a free prize draw with many chances to win free flights to a European location of the CIA's choice.

--
I for one welcome our new data-retentive overlords

Re:two years?

[wheany]

Stay a while. STAY FOREVER!

Destroy him, my robots!

So you want to be the ISP everyone uses do this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they only specified that data must be stored and not how. An ISP could choose to store it in an extremely mathmatically intensive encrypted format. They would be able to truthly say it is stored and they would be able to provide it on request, however the time it would take to decrypt it would be extremely long. So they can say, "Sure you can have it, here it is.", Then 2 years later when they have finally decrypted it they can go about their merry way with it. They could also simply provide it in paper form, in say one line of a printed roll 20 miles long. They are not required to make it easy to find just to provide it. For that matter they could simply store it in any unindexed way. People hear data and the think database, but why do that. Since these people seem too stupid to comprehend how much data this is and what they would need to do to locate anything specfic let them find out. Sure here is the 1 Petabyte log for Tuesday have at it.

Re:Volumes of Data

[KiloByte]

Wrong. No matter what marketing departments of disk manufacturers say, a kilobyte is still 1024 bytes.

Any attempts to make my /. nick ugly will be punished with extreme prejudice.