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Re:Just Addresses by Anonymous Coward · 2008-01-23 21:26 · Score: 1, Informative · on E.U. Regulator Says IP Addresses Are Personal Data

[...] but in EU there's a big difference: nobody can NOT store your personal data without warning you and giving methods to correct AND ERASE your data.

I suppose you wanted to say: "nobody is allowed to store your personal data without warning you and giving methods to correct and erase your data."
This is a principle of German "Recht auf Informationelle Selbstbestimmung".

Anyway, I agree with Germany's 'commissioner for data protection and freedom of information' Peter Schaar (wrong name in TFA) that an IP is public, but nevertheless personal data (better term in German: "personenbezogene Daten") because as the 'Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data' (see Directive 95/46/EC) states:

Article 2
Definitions

For the purposes of this Directive:
(a) 'personal data' shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity;

Some prior commentators already agreed that a telephone number is personal data (though many don't seem to know the difference between private and personal data). Why not treat IPs the same way?

Please note that not all is well in Europe since telephone numbers (already regarded as personal data) and IPs have to be stored by the associated carriers (ISPs for example) for later processing by law enforcement agencies (allegedly solely) in the course of investigating terroristic activities and other crimes (see 'Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks').
This is heavily disputed (see e.g. http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com/ and Digital Rights Ireland challenge to Data Retention).
By the way, there are some proposed methods to disable logging of IPs regarding Apache webserver - et al..

For more information about 'EU Data Retention' see EU Data Retention - doqumentation and Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Phone numbers are not social security numbers. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-05-31 07:51 · Score: 0 · on More Details of the NSA's Social Network Analysis

Phone numbers are not social security numbers. They identify phones not people. Hence the name phonenumber. If ma bell had wanted numbers to identify people then it would have just used social security numbers...

I may sound like an ass$%^ explaining this to a little child, but in the US a public prosecutor once actually claimed, in front of a judge, that an IP address is like a social security number! You could laugh at this, but the suspect did walk.

The same goes for a huge gang of 419 scammers in Amsterdam. (Some of which actually came from Nigeria). They lived with a lot of people in a very few apartments. So who was sitting behind the PC when the "send" button was pressed? An undercover agent dressed up as a pizza delivery guy could find out. Just ring the doorbell and peek in after a spam salvo is send. The problem certainly wasn't cooperation between the police and the internet provider. This group used stolen cable modems hooked up by crooked installers. So the provider had every reason to work along with whatever the police would ask.

The biggest offender in this area must be the RIAA and its friends. They just keep harassing grannies.

Sure in 99%, hell, lets make that 99.99%, of the cases a phone number identifies a pin protected cell phone that can only be answered by the person who carries it and whose name is on the phone bill and the bank account that pay that phone bill and who owns the house where that cell phone spends its nights....

But people who fear they might be the target of surveillance will work hard, very hard, to be in that 0.01%. Depending on the penalty of getting caught they might go pretty far in this. Would you steal cell phones if it kept you out of GITMO?

So you if you talk about social network analysis then you risk getting people a little to excited about extensive legislation and billion dollar surveillance projects. Its more like mapping a sexual relations network to find STD sources...based on surveys. You would be wise to expect some missing links. Phone traffic network analysis sounds less exciting, but it's accurate.

So how would you stay safe regardless of how high your e-mail identity scores on the statistical Japanese^d^d^dcommunist^d^d^dterrorist detection system?

Well Khalid Shaikh Mohammed used Swiss pre-paid cell phones. A good start and had he seen HBO`s the Wire like others suggested here already then he would have dumped them regularly as well. He didn't. (The register headlined: "Al Qaeda boss confused phone SIM with cloaking device")

Maybe that fact that they used Swiss phones is the result of a western intelligence agency "hinting" that this would be smart. There is no way that someone would mistake banking secrecy and neutrality with communication security after the crypto AG story. For those who forgot, Crypto AG sold NSA and German intelligence designed crypto systems to every country, but especially those under extra US export rules. That is, until Iran decided to take one of their sales rep`s hostage and started asking questions, after that other customers started asking questions as well ;-) And then some of the engineer started talking about the people that gave them the algorithms.

A Pakistani named Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan had a smarter idea. He and his communication partners regularly changed e-mail addresses and used crypto. He may have used his own algorithms though. He got caught and started to work with Pakistani intelligence. He started to arrange for the capture of the people he was in contact with. But then there was a pre-election terror alert in the US. US Intelligence people were looking for an explanation for this alert, so someone leaked to the New York Times that Pakistan