Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm suprised that the ISP's did this for so long and the news didn't leak out.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Glad it's Ireland and not the UK. Unless they meant Northern Ireland .. which they didn't, I think.
Still, this kind of thing is probably going on in loads of countries, it just happens that they found this one out.
E000-VB14-G8RY
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
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.
Banaaaana!
And it's only traffic information, not the actual data that gets passed. I would have thought they'd keep that kind of information anyway. If *access* to the gathered information is regulated properly, I don't see a problem.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
That small place at the top of society where all the power lies, is like a magnet for dirtbags. The more concentrated power is, the faster the dirtbags take over.
Notice how fast things began to slip right here in the United States after power was concentrated through the rash of recent laws. One day you look up and wonder, "Who are these people running my country?"
Ok, now let's see how many people bitch about this as usually do about the US government *possibly* doing things like this that no one ever seems to be able to offer up hard evidence on. Either we don't do it, or we're that damn good at it.
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
if internet use is any indicator on how the telecom systems are used, the list would be:
50% about sex
30% spam (or telemarketing)
29% adolescent mush
1% calls to a data recovery shrink
hmm... may be not that accurate... anybody care to modify? (ooh, I'm beginning to see several "in soviet russia posts)
I drink, therefore, I am.
-- W. C. Fields
That's a truckload of data, even if it was just "traffic information."
I wonder just what that means... "traffic information." Surely time, date, duration, initiating and receiving parties. I can't see them having too much beyond that... It should be a logistical impossibility to have any information about the content of all those messages... way too much data to sift through and catalog.
Interesting that this was reportedly done by fiat.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
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)
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.
Google announced that they had purchased the database, refused to say why.
The Irish have something in common with the Americans. BUT, America takes the cake. For a country, where one doesn't know whether their president was killed by a fellow countryman or a foreign traitor, where they don't know wether Area51 is a top secret UFO something or a big joke, where national secrets are too big to tell to the president himself, it has done remarkably well. Probably, 99% of USA's problems would be solved if the government is frank, honest and open to its citizens ;)
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
The Irish are out to get us!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
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!
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.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
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?
**Bob Dylan says: You never ask questions when God's on your side.
With good reason. Terrorism wasn't newly invented in 2001; Irish nationalist groups had been causing trouble in Britain for decades. Eavesdropping on transmissions from Ireland to the UK probably allowed a great many plots to be foiled.
I'd keep it secret, of course, but not out of fear of worrying the public; I'd want the IRA to think their phone communications were secure, the better to exploit this intelligence source. If word gets out that phone calls are routinely tapped, then the bad guys will switch to some other communication; encrypted snailmail, perhaps, which cannot be so easily compromised.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Now, come on. We have no quarrel with the American people themselves, we just want regime change.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
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
This type of retention can be used to trace stolen mobile phones and can also greatly assist in the process of criminal investigation - some crime investigations have gone on past the 6 month retention time prevalent in other countries. See the Guerin investigation, or the Omagh bombing for examples.
I have no problem with this retention as long as it requires a court order or equivalent for the release of the information to the relevant authorites, and never to a non-govermental agency.
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
they already did :)
..life is just a dream
...its Ireland, so 99% of the calls are:
"So, are ya goin to da pub?"
"I'll see ya there around 10"
"cheers"
And why did I read that as "during an initial pub meeting"?
Mark
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?
...our American cousins are complaining about this "afront to civil liberties" while thousands of their own citizens are being detained, without trial or charge, in undisclosed locations across the US?
One would think that with Ireland's experience with terrorism, the Yanks would be applauding this!
I think some other posters have made the point quite well. Just because a government collects the information, doesn't mean they can do anything with it without a court order. I can tell you with some confidence that virutally all governments collect this information,it just that getting at it is hard (as is sifting through it - how many phone , cell, fax transmissions are there in your city or town in one day? Try picking out specific information out of that!).
Collecting information is morally neutral. Use that information to catch the Omagh bombers, and collecting it is good. Use it to track citizens arbitrarily and to detain them without trial or charge and it is evil. I'd be less worried about the collecting and more about how it is used.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
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
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...
---- Booth was a patriot ----