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."

Comments

What were the techies doing?

[jericho4.0]

I'm suprised that the ISP's did this for so long and the news didn't leak out.

Every line?

[Exiler]

If every bit going into the country had to be stored for 3 years, wouldn't they eventually run out of space for hard drives? I mean, the way storage density is right now, they can't possibly store EVERYTHING.

Re:Every line?

[spacefight]

For billing purposes three year long? Why that? Six months seems long enough for most countries...

Re:Every line?

[upside]

Obviously the government isn't interested in the billing. :) I'm just saying storage isn't such an issue if they don't have to keep the actual data, and that already they have the systems in place for storing this information.

Not even news here yet.

[ColmanReilly]

Slashdot is the first I've heard of it, and I pay reasonable attention to the main news services here in Dublin. It's a little premature to talk about considerable citizen reactions.

As background, the Minister in question is a PD, which makes him pretty close to holding views familiar to those in the US: I'm sure he'd be pretty comfortable in the right of the Democratic party or the left of the Republican, which makes him far right by European standards.

Is this new?

[sabri]

As far as I know, European legislators are working on the same for years now. In The Netherlands the government is working on legislation which also enforces a policy on ISP's to keep their traffic-data for years (currently the to-be-kept counters remains on 3 years). Fortunately, they are listening (or at least pretending to listen) to the ISP's as well; we have been asked what kind of impact that would have on the ISP and what kind of technical measures would be necessary.

An odd thing is that in some countries it currently is illegal to keep traffic-data for such a long time; the data is only to be kept for billing purposes and when that is done, the data must be deleted for privacy reasons.

What's different

[cymbaliner]

What will this law change? Prior to this law, how long were records like this kept? I get the feeling this law won't change much. My question is why does the Irish government feel the need to ensure three years of record keeping? Why three years? Why at all?

Re:Better to be open about it, or not?

[matt_wilts]

I think it was in the UK rather than Ireland (I believe this is from Channel 4 but Google has lost the full attribution):

HOW BRITAIN EAVESDROPPED ON DUBLIN

THE MINISTRY of Defence "Electronic Test facility", a rather mysterious 150-ft high tower stands isolated in a British Nuclear Fuels Limited site at Capenhurst, Cheshire. Locals
knew that the tower housed a dark secret but did not know what it was. That secret is now out.

The tower was craftily erected between two BT microwave radio towers carrying telephone traffic. The ETF was the ideal place to discreetly intercept international telephone calls of the Irish government, businessmen and those of suspected of involvement with IRA terrorism.

Channel 4 filmed extensive BT equipment inside the building, including optical fibre cables linking the tower to the MoD's communication system.

The hi-tech white ETF tower included eight floors of advanced electronic equipment and three floors of aerial galleries.

These were used to extract and sort the thousands of communications passing through every hour. Fax messages, e-mails, telexes and data communications were automatically sorted by computers scanning their contents for key words and subjects of interest. Telephone calls could
be targeted according to the numbers dialled or by identifying the voice of the speaker.

At the time the tower first came into operation the IRA campaigns were raging.

Relations between the British and Irish government's were not always smooth, with the British suspecting their Irish counterparts of being sympathetic to the IRA.

Since the early 1990s, the British electronic spy agency GCHQ and its American counterpart NSA have developed sophisticated libraries of voice profiles to use in scanning international telephone messages.

The ETF tower was operated by personnel from an RAF unit based in Malvern, Worcestershire. The "special signals" section of the RAF "Radio Introduction Unit" install and run projects for GCHQ.

According to local residents, the site was manned 24 hours a day by a team of two to three people, until the start of 1998.

Besides the Capenhurst tower, communications to and from the Irish Republic were also intercepted at a similar but smaller GCHQ station in County Armagh. This intercepts microwave radio and other links between Dublin and Belfast.

A third GCHQ station at Bude, Cornwall, intercepts western satellite communications, including to and from Ireland.

From 1990 until 1998 the Capenhurst ETF tower intercepted the international communications of the Irish Republic crossing from Dublin to Anglesey on a newly installed optical fibre submarine cable, called UK-Ireland 1.

From Anglesey, the signals were carried across Britain on British Telecom's network of microwave radio relay towers, centred on the BT Tower in London.

The key link, from Holyhead in Anglesey to Manchester, passes directly over the Wirral peninsula to the south of Birkenhead. The ETF tower was built to pop up into this beam.

When the new cable was planned in the mid 1980s,
intelligence specialists at the Defence Ministry and GCHQ Cheltenham, the electronic spying headquarters, realised that the radio beams passed directly over the nuclear processing plant at Capenhurst.

During 1988, a temporary interception system was built on the roof of the BNFL factory. When tests of the Irish interception system proved successful, intelligence chiefs decided to go ahead with a full-scale system.

Within the Defence Ministry, the project was classified "Top Secret Umbra". The codeword Umbra is used to designate sensitive signals intelligence operations.

Not even BNFL, on whose land the ETF tower was built, was let into the secret.

The Ministry of Defence held a meeting with residents early in 1989 and urged them not to talk about the site. In return, they were given free fencing and double glazing.

The architects were told that the tower had to contain three floors of aerial galleries, each with four special "dielectric" windows. These are opaque to visible light, but allow radio beams to enter.

By building the tower in this way, no-one could see what aerials were inside, or where they were pointing.

But the architects' plans, lodged at the local authority offices, revealed the true purpose of the tower.

The plans revealed that the radio transparent windows had to be aligned on an extremely precise compass bearing of 201.12 degrees to magnetic north.

Aerials pointing through these windows would point precisely at the British Telecom towers at Gwaenysgor, Clwyd, and Pale Heights, near Chester. These are the towers carrying the Ireland's international communications links through Britain.

During installation in 1989 and 1990, defence officials were concerned to conceal what was going into the tower. To disguise it, contractors vans were repainted in the livery of BT and other public utilities. BT refused to say whether this had been done with their knowledge and consent.

Since the Irish telecommunication moved onto a different system over a year the Capenhurst tower has been made redundant. The Ministry of Defence are trying sell it off.

It would not make a very comfortable home and it is hard to see what legitimate business might now be interested.

The Defence Estate organisation said this week that it had extended the time for offers to be made. It would accepts bids for the tower up to midday today.

The Home Office said: "In accordance with standard practice, the Government does not comment on alleged interception activity." BT said it did not wish to comment.

The Irish government said it would comment later.

History of the Eavesdropping Agency

THE BRITISH Government's eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), is based in Cheltenham.

It was set up 1946 after the success of the Government Code and Cipher School in Bletchley of cracking the German Enigma codes during the Second World War.

It is responsible for monitoring telecommunications and telephone calls in Britain and around the world and employs some 4,000 people. It works closely with MI6.

GCHQ uses state-of-the-art equipment for a wide range of operations to decrypt diplomatic traffic and to identify the voices of individuals who are of interest to the West's intelligence services.

GCHQ officers have been closely involved in the British efforts to tackle the IRA. GCHQ also works closely with the US eavesdropping operation, the National Security Agency. The agencies work together on a system called "Echelon", an integrated global surveillance network intercepting international satellite and communications links. It is said to have benefited the US and UK with information about arms and trade deals.

Until 1975 few people outside the intelligence community knew about the existence of GCHQ.

In the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher took union rights away from GCHQ staff on the basis that trade unionists were a potential threat to national security. Those rights have now been restored. After the Cold War, GCHQ cut back on staff numbers. The Cheltenham headquarters is being rebuilt at a cost of pounds 300m.

so?

[Anonymous Coward]

lets put the argument this way.

there is a high probability that your itemised invoice is store a backup tape at the print vendor for a number of months, maybe even years.

there is a 100% probability that the billing system at the telco you use has ALL of the call records you ever made, on ANY network you may have made them (roaming or otherwise)

there is a very high probability that your call records generated by the switching platform the telco uses are stored and backed up accordingly.

most people who read slashdot know that backups are important for both data retention, financial auditing, and customer dispute purposes.

the real question i have, that none of the articles make clear is WHO stores this. if the goverment is intending on marshalling this information then there is a problem. asking the telcos is far more privacy friendly, but only just. chances are, they have this information anyway. is it really all the mess its blown up to be?

More scary information about interception systems

[blanch]

If you want to really scare yourself about this stuff, read the European Parliment report online here.
It covers in great detail the state of international communications intelligence, with a focus on Echelon (i.e. the UK/USA alliance secret communications interception system), and the related threats to freedom and economic competitiveness.

It's a big report, but its extremely comprehensive and honest. The kind of thing "M" gets to read in James Bond flicks.
It puts estimated numbers on how many phone calls, emails, web accesses, SMS messages, Faxes etc. are intercepted from different countries; and also describes how they acheive this.

I was very surprised how little attention it got from the media when it was published.

Views on the issue

[MoThugz]

OK, from the article itself, it can be concluded that the author finds the Irish govt actions to be reducing the individual's right to communication privacy.

It can also be summarized that the Irish government is merely trying to protect the rights (and lives) of the general public considering the turbulent past of the Irish republic.

The question is, where do we draw the line in respecting individual privacy as well as safeguarding the interests of the public at large? Is there a "right way" to do this? I think that this issue is subjective in its essence. No one can tell you what info is private and what should be made known publicly. I bet almost nobody cares if you're having an affair with your neighbour's wife, unless of course the husband... or you/the neighbour is someone famous.

In these times of post-911... every western government is becoming paranoid especially when there's Middle Eastern/Arabic/Islamic people are involved. Deny it as much as you want, but deep down inside you know that this bigotry is true. How else can you explain an airport terminal shutdown just because an Arab sprayed perfume on himself as well as two immigration officers?

Just an example of how screwed the world has become... Now the internet (one of the biggest global hope as an instrument of international unity), as well as other forms of communications are being threatened by "perceived threats".

I'm all for the effort of combatting terrorism... but not at the extent of paranoid delusions that "the al-Qaeda has 0wned the Internet".

Re:No mention of network traffic

[cobyrne]

If *access* to the gathered information is regulated properly, I don't see a problem.

The Data Protection Commissioner has outlined some of the problems that exist with such a data retention scheme, even if access is "properly regulated".

Of course, one thing that no-one has mentioned yet is that if privacy is outlawed, then only outlaws will have privacy. I have a mobile phone - now that I know that all calls I make on that phone will be recorded and potentially used by law enforcement, I feel like going across the street to a public phone and making all my calls from there. I don't have anything to hide from the law, but if I happen to get caught up in some difficulties with the law, I don't particularly want the law to have unhindered access to all the details of what I use my phone for, as I use my phone for some very very personal things indeed. And that is the huge problem with this system - it is extremely easy for outlaws to defeat it - all that they have to do is to go "across the street" to a public payphone.

Re:Creeping fascism

[ratamacue]

Have you considered the possibility that terrorism is directly related to political power? Could there be a connection, for instance, between US foreign policy and 9/11?

Thats NOTHING! In LA,CA the store all payphones!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats NOTHING! In LA,CA the store all payphones!

Its a fact, its little known, but was one time announced in a front page story in LA Times, that "for security and the Drug War" every single call made from a pay phone in los angeles is permanently recorded and stored.

Their reasoning for this fascism, much like "echelon" is that they are not listening to these "public conversations" they are just storing them. Ha!

No on complains.

And you think thats sick, in San Francisco city (and extended city area of SF Airport), you cannot call vertain 800 numbers from any public payphone if the numbers belong to pagers.

Pagers are considerred "bomb detonators" and "drug mule contact tools" I guess. I have to BEG private citizens to let me use their restaurant phones.

America is much more evil than UK.

Also front page news in NYT newspaper one august yeasr ago revealed that its a fdederal law that 1% (yes one full percent) of all simultaneous calls made in San Francisco have the ability to be simultaneously stored digitally. ONE PERCENT!

At least its not 100% such as in pay phones. Are you one of the 1% this week?

Umm it said phone companies, not ISP

[nurb432]

Im guilty of not reading stories too, but this time it was even in the overview that it was PHONE lines.. and not 'traffic', only the actual connections that were being monitored..

Still a hell of a lot of data.. and yes suprising it didnt leak...