Digital Surveillance for EC Governments

Joel Rowbottom writes: "The Council of the European Union (the 15 EU governments) is about to back the demands of EU "law enforcement agencies" for full access to all telecommunications data to be written into all Community legislation in the future, and for existing laws to be re-examined - a move that is even more far-reaching than the decision to sign up to the FBI plan for the interception of telecommunications. At the centre is the issue of a seven-year period of data retention. There's a lot more about it at statewatch.org including an up-to-date store of relevant documents." The BBC and the Register have articles about this. Both news articles mention this seven-year data retention period, but I don't see it in any of the recent documents, which only discuss general "requirements" for law enforcement, such as tapping and access to calling records. From what I'm reading, law enforcement seems to be concerned about getting rid of the requirements to erase data about communications traffic (under the EU privacy laws) rather than creating affirmative requirements to store such data.

Comments

Re:*sigh*

[rw2]

Come on people, this information already exists in server logs across the world! It's not like they are proposing something that is novel


What they are proposing is novel (and significant) in that they are *requiring* that logging be turned on (which on many servers, for many reasons, it is not) *and* that the company spend it's time and money ensuring that the logs persist for seven years. Presumably one gets heavily fined if a backup tape goes bad!

Ok, the backup tape might be a frear mongering, but I can imagine that if a tape goes bad and the gummint finds a memo outlining to backup processes that talks about the cost of media, the half-life of the media selected *and* then chooses to go the cheap route rather than ensure that they comply with the law that a fine for a bad tape is certainly going to happen.

Slippery slope baby, slippery slope.

--
Poliglut

More on EU

[joq]

News coverage:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/5/19003.html
The Council of the European Union, which represents the 15 member governments, will discuss implementing a policy originally designed with the FBI six years ago. It calls for the retention of "every phone call, every mobile phone call, every fax, every e-mail, every website's contents, all internet usage, from anywhere, by everyone, to be recorded, archived and be accessible for at least seven years," notes the journal.

After reading that I was a bit amused since I think its part of the Cybercrime bill they're trying to pass which would allow LEA's to exchange information, and cross warrants to be served, however for those who don't know, Dubya said no to the bill so lets get that out. (I'll find the link when I can just woke up).

Anyways here is the most insighful/interesting document I found on it with an excerpt. [link]

Privacy is dead. We are watched by 1.5m closed-circuit television cameras, more per head of population than any country on Earth. Our government, police and intelligence services have more legal powers to poke around in our private lives than those of communist China. And thanks to new technologies from mobile phones to the internet, they can use those powers to find out where we are, whom we talk or send e-mails to, and what websites we click on. According to most experts in the field, a police state with powers of control and surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of Hitler or Stalin could now be established in Britain within 24 hours. And guess what: MI5 probably read this article before you did. It was delivered by e-mail, a hopelessly insecure system. It is full of the sort of security-sensitive words the spooks look out for, and, as I shall explain, I seem to be an MI5
target.

But the weirdest thing of all is that we really don't care. To take an example that may sound trivial but isn't, the Television Licensing Authority is currently running an advertising campaign boasting of its ability to invade our privacy. Hoardings show a local street sign with the caption that declares, four people in this street don't have a TV licence and the TLA knows who they are.

Sad to see these things, but soon we're going to have an influx of either zombies, or guys like Gene Hackman's Enemy of the State character around.

Seven years of backups

[Alien54]

Just the idea that someone could be required to have seven years of backups is scary.

Strangely enough there are suggestions that europe has strong elements that are pushng towards social control and social purity on many fronts.

This cuts both ways, in that the proposed controls on dangerous groups are applauded by many, until the amount of research that a eurocop would want to have at his finger tips is added up. Typically, it boils down to the idea of folks being in favor of the benefits of a police state only for certain people. People need to sort out their thinking on this just a bit.

The SOS Europe site is at:

http://www.statewatch.org/soseurope.htm

The page with the listing of the full documentation is here:

http://www.statewatch.org/news/2001/may/03Cenfopol .htm

alot of the docs are in PDF format, but the documentation you seek is on the second page.

as noted here
http://www.statewatch.org/news/dec00/01tapping.htm

The demand for a new law for all records to be held and maintained for at least seven years comes out of the discussions held in the G8 group on High-Tec Crime. Public pronouncements on how long records of all communications should be held varies from one to six months.The period of seven years requested by the NCIS matches the demands of the FBI in the G8 discussions where it is being argued that every country has to have the same, extensive, time-limit because otherwise it will be impossible to track communications. It is said that if a communication, say a telephone call, involves four different countries (A, B, C & D) intelligence-gathering will be useless if countries B & C do not hold full data for the same time period.

The G8 discussions have centred on the "problems" created for law enforcement and security and intelligence agencies by the 1995 and 1996 EU Data Protection Directives which require communications data to be destroyed once it is surplus to commercial needs - after a few days or weeks. Faced with this situation the agencies attending the G8 meetings are campaigning at national level for their governments to opt out of the Directives in order to establish de facto "international standards for data retention" (NCIS).

I am fascinated and alarmed by the FBI connection

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Re:Seven years of backups

[imipak]

Cheers for the links.

Speaking as a UK citizen who was once (looong ago :) politically active in one of the mainstream political parties, I find that I'm getting more, not less, radicalised as I get older (I'm in my early 30s now.) I think there are broad generalised conclusions we can all draw, which more-or-less hold true throughout the developed world:

• Politicians don't understand the internet;
• The more they find out about it (mostly from to highly tendentious briefings from the organisations of state and corporate control - see below), the more frightening they find it.
• Police and spook organisations see it as a magic carpet to increased powers, greater control, and bigger budgets.
• We who see that freedom of speech, increased communication across borders (geographical, political, cultural) have a moral duty to educate others, agitate against such terrible laws as much as practical, and push the boundaries of freedom back.

These proposals are up there with the current proposal here in the UK to enforce compulsory licenses for all sysadmins. No, really!! http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/18879.html

Like RIP (trust PGP communication with a UK citizen? Sucker!), there are a lot of laws stacking up that are impractical, or too unpopular, to be enforced yet. These are *more* repressive - when enforcement of the law becomes discretionary, the scene is set for corruption and repression. The drug laws are a good example: as a 30-something white middle class male in regular employment and no record, recreational drugs are de-facto decriminalised for me. But if the cops want to "get" some working class black kid who gets up their nose by (say) protesting about deaths in custody... guess how easy it is for him to "disappear" into prison, with the likely destruction of his future prospects even if it's a short sentence? Pure evil. These things are going onto the statute books so that they can be pulled out of their sleeves when they're needed by the powers-that-be.

We've got an election in progress here at present, let's try to raise these issues at every opportunity.
-- "I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

My Answer, Give 'em What They Want

[ackthpt]

Create apps which generate bogus network traffic among sites, I.E. generate emails out of your spelling dictionary, and stuff like that. Use bots to surf, download, etc. Create extraneous garbage posts to bulletin boards..uh..like..goats.ex..uh...kinda like..uh..on slashdot...er... Well, anyway, it'll keep em hopping and maybe drive up employment in the mass storage businesses. :)

Sir, the cracker refered to a Beowulf Cluster of VIC-20 computers.
Good work, Johnson, what have searches turned up?
7.43e14 references to Beowulf Clusters on a site called Slashdot between 2000 and 2006.
Right! Shut them down and haul them in. Break out the rubber gloves, men!

--
All your .sig are belong to us!