EU Approves Data Retention 350
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."
I am going to be rich! (Score:5, Insightful)
two years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Volumes of Data (Score:5, Insightful)
There had better be some incentives for housing that kind data. For a busy ISP, that would mean GBs and GBs of data. Where's it going to be stored and who's going to pay for it?
This story belongs in "Your Rights Online" (Score:5, Insightful)
encrypted proxies (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Volumes of Data (Score:3, Insightful)
The solution to the Recording Industry (Score:3, Insightful)
Why this is not ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Music Industry?! (Score:1, Insightful)
Who doubts the endgame? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you think they're merely out for fair sharing, think again. I may hate the rights I've lost through Bush and Clinton's wars and social programs, but I see no real difference in Europe. In some ways I see fewer freedom and more tyranny.
Open WiFi access points make these rules useless.
Re:Who doubts the endgame? (Score:2, Insightful)
Haven't been across the pond in awhile, have we?
Basic IT Knowledge (Score:1, Insightful)
Phew, that's a relief (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Volumes of Data (Score:5, Insightful)
Of COURSE they're interested in gaining access (Score:3, Insightful)
It only becomes a problem when the authorities grant them access. They ask all they like, as long as they don't get it. If they do get it, then it's the authorities that should be blamed.
Re:Gimme a break (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for this to happen, you have to stop supporting them. Don't buy (or download) their products. Don't listen to their mass marketed drivel. Tell your friends, your family, and everyone else you think will listen that every time you support these companies, you are chipping away at your freedoms.
As long as the majority of us continute to pay the record industries money, they will simply continue in their quest to make sure that we all pay them more money. If we stand up for our rights, stop buying their products, and make sure that they realize that they are here to sell entertainment to us, and that we do not exist to buy entertainment from them, then that will be a start.
All this talk of "screw them" and "I hope they die off" and whatever else will do nothing to protect our rights, especially when governments are making it easier and easier for these corrupt and greedy companies to infringe on our privacy.
Re:Volumes of Data (Score:5, Insightful)
And where are the ISP's going to get the money to pay for this?
So for 50 bonus mod points,
Re:Volumes of Data (Score:5, Insightful)
EU ISP customers. One way or the other.
Re:Gimme a break (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way, the customer is screwed.
Re:Volumes of Data (Score:4, Insightful)
EMC, for example, offers mass storage devices capable of coping with that.
I know a major ISP in Europe who has an EMC storage with several TB of capacity.
and who's going to pay for it?
The ISP. Which in the end means you, the customer. Nice, isn't it? Not only are you now under constant surveilance, you also pay for it yourself.
Re:Gimme a break (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardware? (Score:3, Insightful)
Make the records publically available. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the _reason_ they want these is to maintain social/political power over people. An elite with privileged access to all that information can control society. In a free society, either everyone should have the communications metadata, or no-one: It's unbalanced information availability that would give the police power to become the classic Big Brother. I'm a lot safer if everyone knows I have a particular embarassing sexual inclination or whatever than if only a small, powerful subset knows.
See David Brin's book "The Transparent Society: Will Technology force use to choose between privacy and freedom?"
The last man in Europe (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the fundamental step. From here on, it's let's add this crime, let's give access to that organisation, let's extend it to this data, let's save it for 100 years instead.
And when there's a war, the occupier will have the ultimate oppressive weapon pre-installed.
And what are you people babbling about? What protocols will be included, ways to obfuscate yourself, the costs of storing this data? There's a bigger picture, people!
Say what you will about the US, atleast they don't have a back door for legislation that would never get by a national parliament. Make room, I'm hopping the pond.
Anti-terrorism business (Score:1, Insightful)
Unless the recording industry is taking responsibility for issues that belong to the government.
But in this case the recording industry should have the same burden as governments: their leaders should be elected by the voters.
Re:Filesharing and this law (Score:5, Insightful)
No ports, no IP's. The folks who came up with this don't think that far.
They think that:
- e-mail is just like phone
- spam does not exist
- ISP's only handle private traffic
- ISP's handle ALL traffic, and have full access to it
- Only EU citizens use ISPs in Europe
- Encryption does not exist
- No-one has his own mailserver
- No-one is going to try to make money by offering tunneling services to non-EU countries
- Terrorists are dumber than they are
It's not that they want every ISP to scan all packets. They're just thinking like lusers. They think internet is managable.
Their plan sucks. It doesn't work, it's leaking like a raincloud, it's unconstitutional for a lot of member states, and they bombard ISPs with costs, work and responsibilities they never asked for and they KNOW is bullcrap.
It's absurd.
Re:Well, what about SMTP? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hang on - did I just compare my country to China? 8-O
Re:encrypted proxies (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Retain data for two years - IS HERE
Will come:
2. Retain content of e-mails and other content for 2 years.
3. Encrypted transmition is forbidden.
4. IPv6 will identify you securely - no anonymous proxies anymore!
I hope that smart brains that will be one step in front of BigBrotherGoverning eye will survive.
How soon we forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't just that the data wasn't retained, the data was never even collected unless you requested it -- otherwise the only billing information that would be kept was a running counter.
Today, the supposedly-democratic countries want to use surveillance that would have given Gestapo and Stasi wet dreams; it's probably no coincidence that the prime ministers in the countries that have pushed the most (UK and Sweden) have been ones acting like power is a God-given right to them personally.
Re:Volumes of Data (Score:2, Insightful)
What about the attempted bomb plant on the New York underground last week? Didn't hear about it? That's because the suspected perpetrators were arrested a year ago before they even considered planning it. Or maybe they wouldn't.
But I would like a requirement that this law is repealed unless there is an increase in prosecutions of terrorists or at least one attack is foiled as a direct result of this legislation.
A scenario (Score:3, Insightful)
We catch a terrorist. I'm not talking about somebody we just think might maybe be a terrorist, I mean we yank him out from behind the wheel of the van bomb in the basement of the skyscraper, or the other passengers monkey-stomp him unconscious as he tries to break into the cockpit of the airplane.
We search his home, and find a computer. On it, we find an email from Ayman Al-Zawahiri, saying "Abdullah will email you the instructions for where to pick up the anthrax." We don't find a copy of the email from Abdullah, and Thunderbird is configured to always prompt him for his Earthlink IMAP password. When we ask him for his password, he says "your mother sews socks that smell". After we type that in, we find out that it's not actually his password, it's just an insult.
Are you saying that you don't think it would be a good thing if we could go ask Earthlink for a list of everybody that's emailed him in the last two years, and cross-reference that with emails received by other known terrorists? Maybe go talk to anybody with the address "abdullah1987@hotmail.com" who emailed him?
If what people are objecting to is a feared misuse of this information, then oversight and legal protections are a better answer than throwing the smoking baby out with the bathwater.
If you honestly think it's not safe for a private company to have this information sitting where a court-granted search warrant could retrieve it, then you probably need to be lobbying to replace your local landfill and garbage trucks with curbside incineration service, too; but don't imply, as the submitter did, that it's not an anti-terrorism effort just because it could also be misused.
This is akin to deciding that a school isn't being honest when they say they're buying new computers for educational purposes just because some kid says he's going to install Quake on one of them.
Re:two years? (Score:1, Insightful)
As the saying goes, there is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program. Here is a similar prediction: the US "patriot" act will never be abolished, and in fact, will pave the way for even greater acts of oppression. Don't belive it? Let's discuss this again in 50 years.
Re:two years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah...I think about that ever time I go across the damned toll bridge down here. Was supposed to be toll only as long a period till it was paid for, which by now is way overly paid for.
I think now...the only operating cost is the actual toll booths they have to pay to maintain and man....
As for actual laws being repealed...about the only one I can think of in the US is the amendments for prohibition. Anything else repealed since then?
Re:Press release from FFII (Score:5, Insightful)
But there appears to be no process for overturning the directive. EU directives override national law. This is a great success for the UK government which tried and failed to have this law passed in the UK.
Ironically, a report by the Commission just 4 years ago on the Echelon surveillance system [cr.yp.to] stated quite clearly that "Only in a 'police state' is the unrestricted interception of
communications permitted by government authorities."
The EU is now officially a 'police state', by the Commission's own words.
Re:Gimme a break (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Volumes of Data (Score:3, Insightful)
One day, the governments will learn that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
I doubt it.
Re:I am going to be rich! (Score:4, Insightful)
Solution 1: The Mountain of Paperwork Method
Set up your system logging to pipe all that data to a line printer. When the authorities ask for your records, point them to a room in which there are a few hundred thousand pounds of unsorted stacks of fanfold paper. If you can convince all the ISPs out there to do this, the law will quickly be abandoned as not useful.
Solution 2: The Law of Information (a.k.a. Thermodynamics/Quantum Electrodynamics) Method
Send the data into a black hole. When they attempt to sue you for failing to retain the data, insist that they prove conclusively that the black hole did not, in fact, retain said data.
Solution 3: The One-Time Pad Method
Using an alpha emitter, generate a one-time pad. Make an offer to allow to use your OTP generator for a reasonable fee. Use this encrypted data stream to encrypt the log data. According to the rules of OTP encryption, destroy the pad immediately after encryption. Insist that if the police state wanted access to the data, they should have been paying for access to your OTP's data stream for the past several months. Hand them a hard drive containing random bytes.
Solution 4: The Laser Beam Into Space method
Encode the data by modulating a laser beam and bouncing the beam off of a planet orbiting a star that is at least three light years away. Upon questioning, insist that if the police state really needed that data, they should have launched a deep space probe centuries ago. Give them the opportunity to launch one now, but remind them that the Alpha Centaurians need the data, too, so if they hurry, they might be able to get the information by the year 2600.
Re:Why this is not ok (Score:5, Insightful)
People often joke that George Orwell was a mere 20 years or so off the mark, such delay perhaps caused by the very fear his book invoked in the hearts of those who would fall victim to such surveillance.
But the scary truth is, this is not a joke. As a majority of communications moves online, even as phone calls are now almost all routed at some point over an IP network, this is perhaps the single largest surveillance undertaking and law that I have ever seen pass. I cannot imagine that any citizen would accept this as representing their beliefs or desires. This is, in fact, one of the scariest things to happen in a long time.
What concerns me further is the reach this has. This is all data that passes over any EU country's network, meaning that any time I visit a website hosted in Europe, my data will be tracked. Any time I email someone in Germany or France, my information will be tracked. This is in no way just surveillance of the EU's citizenry, but of the entire world's.
I for one am off to fashion a tin foil hat.