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Will Britain Log All Communications For 7 Years?
psychohorsie writes: "The BBC are reporting that the British intelligent services and the police want all of the telephone calls, e-mails and internet traffic in the countr to be logged and kept in storage for [7] years. If this comes to pass, this is a major blow to democracy in my opinion. They may have good intentions with this stuff to begin with ..."
Hian Bosu also points to this
story in The Observer . The shape of things to come?
Cool, I wanna see what Brittish taxpayers will say when someone will try to implement such thing... Because only two thingies will come out of this. First it will be impossible, technically and humanly, to hold up, control, process and manipulate such level of information. A week on logging more than 2 thousand users is enough to overkill your best servers (I'm not talking about this iXXX trashcan arch), fill up the capacity of your disks (reaching a good 300 gigs) and turn every channel into a 2400 bps link in the end term. People did this and came into the conclusion it is MADNESS to try hunting everyone and everything.
But what is more funny is the financial part... Such surveillance eats up to 80% of communication costs in the end... And it will be VERY FUNNY to see Brittish users paying for such...
First, if this actually stood, the stock of hard drive manufactures would jump through the roof. When East Germany did this kind of thing, they had very significant amounts of resources devoted just to storing the data. Even using recordable DVD systems from companies like Dictaphone still takes a lot of resources.
You have to be able to use the data. I know this sounds self evident, but it doesn't matter how much data you have if you aren't capable of using it. Such a database would quickly overwhelm anything else in the world, even WalMarts'. You have to get the important info to humans to analyze. Too much info, and you can't manage it.
This violates 3 important acts that have are active in Britian according to the Observer:
1.Human Rights Act
2.European Union Law
3.Data Protection Act
The Europeans are /much/ more sensitive on privacy issues than the US. After dealing with Communist goverments for several decades, can you blame them? This would be a particular problem with the German goverment, which is still going through data seized from the East Germans over a decade ago.
The bottom line, cost, the article in the observer claims that they will set it up for 3 million pounds (about $5 million) and maintain it for 9 million pounds (about $14 million). The amount of money they are talking about probably wouldn't even buy the hardware that they need. They also have to look at building space, lots and lots of building space, near a POP on the backbone (naturally very expensive land). People, this requires enterprise class database administrators. Not only are these people rare, but you have to get them to all pass background checks.
This also isn't practical on an infrastructure standpoint. You have to be able to support such a system in small towns and rural areas that have trouble supporting what they have. Such a system would probably require a carnivore like setup, and they just might use Carnivore if they went with it. There is a long history of cooperation between the Brits and US intelligence networks, why would this be any different? The amount of data collected by a system like carnivore has got to be enormous, imagine what it would be when you tell it to collect everything. This leads to the next point -
There isn't enough bandwidth. Assumably data collected at distributed points (like ISP's) would be forwarded to a centralized database (you do want to cross-index it don't you?). This isn't the kind of thing you drop in the post, or have Fed-Ex bring. Such a system would demand real time updating if it is going to be used for active monitoring of drug deals etc. They would have to send this over the Internet, and that would require a massive infrastructure overhaul by BT. The cost of the amount of bandwidth required alone would be exorbitant, far beyond the 9 million pound cost that is the supposed budget. Than you have the cost of overhauling rural and small town infrastructure. If you only have a single E1 going to a town, you can't just buy more bandwidth, you have to lay cable.
The last reason is Political Ramifications. There are very serious human rights concerns with something like this. Not only will the citizens of Britian be upset about this, but the EU will probably not be very happy either.
However, Britain has the strongest tradition of democracy and free speech in the world, and has indeed defined many aspects of these institutions. Free speech has been guarranteed under Law for some 785 years. Also, Britain is a small and densly populated country, meaning that the typival Briton knows and trusts his fellow man.
Britain has no need of written constitutions, freedom laws etc etc. In Britain, the institutions of government are trusted and respected, and can be relied upon to do their job in a fair manner.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Imagine it. A UK beholden to American security interests, passing draconian security legislation at the whim of the powers that be across the Atlantic, with at any moment the ruling party deciding it's at war against the European supernation, and then deciding that it wasn't, and that it never was at war against them.
Thank god it will never happen. ;)
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