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Secret Irish Data Repository Uncovered
topgold writes "During an initial public meeting yesterday, the Irish Justice Ministry revealed that for nearly a year, the Irish government has mandated all telecommunications operators store traffic information from every landline, fax and mobile phone call for at least three years. Irish Times journalist Karlin Lillington offers insights regarding this secret data retention regime in several national newspaper columns. A considerable citizen reaction is at the boiling point, stoked by a civil liberties discussion board and the rejuvenation of the Electronic Freedom Ireland citizen group. By law, the Irish government can deep-six any Cabinet discussions related to the 'deliberative process' and since this decision to retain phone records happened at Cabinet level, it could have remained hidden for more than five years."
Sounds remarkably related to the Tampa spying">Tampa spying debacle Australia had last year.
The explanation given for deep sixing cabinit records for five years is that many of them relate to the peace process.
Yesterday the government proposed to be allowed increase this time to 15 years, given this on the same day we find out the've been snooping us is very disturbing
I think this article gives a better description of what the data retention policy is. It's more concise anyhow.
I used to be a narrator for bad mimes. (wright)
So that's why Linux.ie built a teraserver.
d .php.
We wanted a large >= 1TB file server mostly to store backups.
http://www.linux.ie/articles/teraserver/backgroun
Conspiracy!
It's been done for several years in Denmark where all cellular phone calls are stored for 5 years before being destroyed, the police can then retrieve the contents using a search warrant.
The "main news services" in Ireland wouldn't know technology if it came up and bit them on the arse. There are three, possibly four, clueful tech journalists in Ireland, and two of them are tied to the Irish Times, which doesn't leave much to spread around the rest of the "main news services". The "main news services" is not the place to look for technology news. I thought every TD&H knew that.
adam
I've been following the debate on privacy here for a few years now. If you want action to be taken on this issue than contact your TD or Senator. Here is a link to their contact details. On a personal note, I am *disgusted* with what the Irish government. This strikes at the heart of privacy for the Irish citizen. IANAL, but this may well be repugnant to the constitution and existing data privacy legislation.
Just you're average nitpicker.
Blogs pointing to blogs pointing to blogs. Not one scrap of technical detail, very little political detail, and only innuendo about gardai (police) involvement. Perfect /. fodder.
Irish telcos, thats my old domain. What they are probably talking about is Call Detail Records from telephone switching equipment, SS7 data from SPs and STPs, lookups of SCP features, billing and customer data. The total amount of data is not that large, a few hundred megabytes per day for all landlines in a small market like Ireland. Mobile system switches can generate much more data, such as cell site handoffs, signal strength, power cycle events and SMS content. GSM/GPRS/UMTS data could total 4-6 Gbytes/day in a market with 2 million handsets.
CDR data was normally kept for a legal minimum of 90 days past each billing cycle, to allow for customer service to deal with complaints. Any disputed data would be copied out of the dataset and kept with the customer record in case the problem took a long time to resolve.
Typically, hard disk based CDR and customer records were kept for nine months before being moved to the recovery pool, and the disk/tape space would be recovered within a year. Billing and customer records are kept permanently, or at least ten years until they are unreadable by modern equipment (9 track, Wang magneto-microfiche, and other horrors)
Immediately after the Omagh bombing, a copy of the complete datasets of all systems in the Republic and NI going back at least 10 months was made and turned over to the police and intelligence services. Combing through that data, the investigators were able to track the exact trips made by the usual suspects in the weeks before the bombing, the exact routes they took, and calls made from vehicle to vehicle in the convoy carrying the bomb south to Omagh. The BBC aired a report on all this about two years ago, much to the chagrin of the powers that be.
This does not seem to concern ISPs, at least for the moment. The meeting seems to have been about who pays for longer data retention, and who pays for investigator access to the data. With a dozen requests per week to a telco for detailed records relating to various cases, it could take several experienced and expensive engineers most of their time. The Irish telcos, as well as ones in the U.S., have been trying to make Law Enforcement Access into a revenue centre. If a detective wants the complete calling history of a certain GSM phone, that could be a billable item. If a prosecutor wants additional data for a conviction, they'll have to dig into their budget and pay the telco for the data. The government wants to compel the telcos to provide this service in return for tax incentives, regulatory breaks, and some other backroom deals.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
they already did :)
..life is just a dream
There's an article just appeared in the last while from RTE here.
I live & work in Dublin. Quite frankly, no one gives a damm about it. Don't believe everything you read.
Slightly related, these records helped secure a prosecution against a persistant abusive caller. The Guards were a great help. If it had been the UK, I would have had to change my telephone number.
Don't loose any sleep over it, unless you like making crank calls.
This is right up my alley. We retain three months for traffic engineering purposes but I could go back two years of archival data. This is the only way we can do traffic engineering to determine if trunk groups are properly sized and if overflows among groups is working correctly. It's amazing how an innocious change in one trunk group can save tens of thousands of dollars a year. Telcos have been keeping this data for years. Why all of a sudden does everyone get surprised? We don't record your conversations. All of the data is for use on our internal networks to track where call volumes come from and go to. Your single phone call is the same to us as a grain of sand is to a beach.
Tisha Hayes