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Endorse EDRI's Statement Against Data Retention
Ville Oksanen writes "Privacy International (PI) and European Digital Rights (EDRI) have published their joint answer to the consultation on mandatory data retention. The European Commission asked for public comments on a proposed retention regime across Europe between 12 and 36 months for all traffic data generated by using fixed and mobile telephony and Internet. As Statewatch puts it: 'This is a proposal so intrusive that Ashcroft, Ridge and company can only dream about it, exceeding even the U.S. Patriot Act.'
EDRI and PI are currently collecting endorsements from organizations and companies for their stamement here. This is unfortunately not enough to stop the process - expecially more should be done in the member states, which ultimately decide the fate of the proposal. So contact your local politicians today!"
The ability to record our movements, intrests, communications will in the future make it possible to really control the population from itself.
No surprise here. Seeing hoow privacy issues are sought to be handled in the US and how more and more of US (mal)practices come over to us (i.e. Europe) every day, there's nothing to be surprised at.
What we need to do is hold our ground and not let these things happen. Same holds for software patents and the like.
Freedom also means you are free to stand up and defend your rights. What we don't defend today may be lost tomorrow. And yes, that's too late. It's always easier [revent than to abolish later.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Since /. is US centric, and this appears to be an EU matter, why would they give a rat's ass what most of us have to say on the matter?
/. visitors give a rat's ass about US matters?
For the same reason european
In this case, the reason might be: The US government might get ideas of going the same way if this proposal gets through.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
If that will come to happen, I will invest my money to all storage companies. Who can store all records of web, email and instant messenger logs? Is it user who is responsible to store all data (including spam email)? Or is it ISP's and teleoperators?
That will be huge amount of data!
Isn't it amazing how all this crap gets put through, even though most of the voters are against the proposal the politicians that are supposed to be our representatives in parliment just don't care and put it through anyway.
They keep up this illusion that we are a 'free' country, living in a 'democracy' but things like this just show how bad things really are. Used to be they would snoop and we all know they did, but they pretended they didn't for sake of negative publicity. Now they (the government) are showing how little the voters views really count. They don't need to worry about what we want, they just swing the terrorism card and pretend its all for our good, Big brother 'looking after our best intrests.' How nice of them.
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
I can't help wondering how they are going to implement this just from the related information point of view. Sure GSM traffic seems trackable via the standards IMSI/IMSE. But how are they going to relate internet traffic to an individual. The would also need to capture DHCP logs etc, etc. It might be easy to capture and store all the data but without something to pull it all together, its could be just a waste of hard disk space
Is it even physically possible to store that much data?
If I stop deleting stuff on my hard drive and archive everything i d/l, it would fill up in a month. Multiply that by 12 or 36 and then, am I supposed to buy a 12-36 harddrives with taxes?
And that doesnt even begin to include all the voice traffic I'm responsible for and mountains of data I d/l via online gaming.
I call bullshit, this is just some fascists wet dream.
Several years ago, I was up for an interview with a company in Holland who had already got a government (not EU) grant to start Internet snooping which they were intending to extend to SMS and eventually voice.
And a lot of snooping already happens in the UK, plus we have more CCTV watching our every move than any other country in the world. This has, of course, dramatically reduced the amount of crime and petty crime we see and we must now be the most pleasant and safest country in the world in which to bring up children. It's getting so good, we will soon be emptying our prisons - which I predict will become quaint tourist destinations at which outsourced Asian tourists can wonder. We live in Arcadia!
Oh joy, oh joy that we should have more snooping to make our lives so much better! We should do away with envelopes or sealed packages and ban curtains or blinds and have web cams in every room (discreetly pointed away from the toilet perhaps).
We could, at last, realise the communist utopia of living like a termite colony. And look how efficient they are! The future beckons comrades, embrace, embrace!!
Did he inhale?
I'm reading a lot of "We can't let that happen" on message boards when it comes to such things. As a non-American anti-Bush propagandist (yes, I like to be a shitdisturber ;)) I often rant and rage about the current state of the US. But now that the same stupid ideas hit my own continent I'm at a loss what about to do. What CAN we do?
I'm really not the pessimistic type most of the time when it comes to personal stuff. But when it involves the gathering of the people I'm pessimistic like hell. Because I know that we almost can't change anything about this stuff.
Let's be honest most of us try to survive. Not in the old fashioned "hunt for food" way but in a modern society where it's not only our body that must survive but our mind as well. Most of us try to stay the heck out of things that could get us in trouble (understandably). And most of us try to not concern ourselves with things we deem not so important. And this is "not so important" for a lot of people because "I'm not a criminal so why should this make me nervous".
So my question to the /. community, which is a certain elite and not a gathering of your average Joe, what can we from a realistic point of view do? Is there a way to get your average Joe to actually write his political representative?
Just the small fact that the Internet doesn't know borders. Send mail to a European server? Buy something from a Europe over the Net? Your messages and transactions get stored. IIRC European ISPs are vehemently against this, for obvious reasons, and law enforcement isn't thrilled either. It's populist scaremongering politicians who are behind this crap.
bork.cc domain for sale. Offers to bork|at|bork.cc
...in the European country of your choice, too.
The main driving force behind these kind of proposals are mainly the center and right of the political spectrum. Just as Bolkenstein (former comissioner and right wing liberal(dutch 'VVD')) introduced the dreaded software patents, so will other right winged.
The amount of energy put into the actions to counteract the european legislators (just like the action against software patents) is huge, but in the end things usually pay off only half, or not at all.
By using your right to choose and elect, and choosing based upon the decisions made by those politicians (pro- or con- the issues you are for/against) you can deal with this thing preemptively.
In the meantime, try to live with the harsh reality but never forget who put this in your lap.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Since /. is US centric, and this appears to be an EU matter, why would they give a rat's ass what most of us have to say on the matter?
Well, I thought the tag line was News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Nothing about the US in there.
Technology is trans-national. What happens in Taiwan will influence the prices of equipment in the US. /. to the US, what a silly idea.
The Internet and its legal framework are even more trans-national. When European sites store their visitors data, they will store US visitors too. When the US strengthens its anti-piracy rules, Australians take heed.
Limiting
Well, I thought the tag line was News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Nothing about the US in there.
True, but MS has(had?) the tagline "Where do you want to go Today?" and they aren't a transportation company, so you generally can't go by a slogan.
The FAQ,however, is a different matter entirely. That's where I got the carefully chosen wording I used in my question (obviously to no avail, given the mod down. Oh well.).
Back on topic, though, I agree 100% that USians SHOULD be against this. What I have doubts about is whether the EU politicos care that we are, or even why they SHOULD.
And he only missed by 20 years...
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Up to a 3 year retention on alt.binaries.* groups? Dudes, I am so moving to EU. Incompletes can bite my pale white ass.
Facts are these...
The UK government is not alone Europe in being really keen on such ideas for some years now.
Not a few weeks, not six months, several years, long before world trade centre stuff, well before osama was front page news.
Note well, anyone who thinks "government" = bush or blair or labour or democrat of whatever is doomed before they start, government in the UK is the many tens of thousands of unelected civil servants who remain in office year after year after year.
These are the corporate pen-pushers trying to carve out a piece of personal power and influence that are really behind all these schemes, and the ballot box will NEVER touch these people.
Not that the citizenry as a whole will ever unite on anything like this, forget it, it won't ever happen.
It is also a straw man argument to claim that such aims are impossible as there just ain't enough disk space on the planet, bullshit, it can be done pretty easy.
Spool all smtp and pop traffic, being text based it will compress real well anyway.
Spool all nntp traffic, when data gets to 80 days out strip out everything except the headers.
Spool all http traffic, you only need to keep the apache server logs on a per individual basis anyway, except where keyword matches allow you to elect to store the entire page.
Doesn't matter if this adds 50% to the costs for an ISP, because it will be added to ALL providers it will be in effect a tax where the cost is passed down to the consumer.
Google and others offering FREE gigabytes of storage will also make a very strong weapon in the armoury for these people claiming that it is quite possible and economical to do.
Scott Nealy said many years ago that the idea of anonymity on the internet was no more than a fiction anyway, so get used to it, little has changed.
OK, so back in the real world, and speaking as someone who was once described on the front pages of the business section of the (London) Times newpaper as an "Electronic Guerilla" and as a self proclaimed anarchist and libertarian, it is cloud cuckoo land to thing that some popular peoples movement is going to stop this happening.
I will offer you a simple proof of why this is so.
Take slashdot itself for an example, a techies website if ever there was one, all the slashdot owners have to do is move from http://www.slashdot.org/ to https://www.slashdot.org/ and lo and behold all those records on government computers for that bit of the internet now hold encrypted data.
Chances of this ever happening?
Zero.
Ok, so it is futile to talk about motivating the masses to move to pgp / blowfish / whatever encrypted communications... it will never happen, 95% of users can't even decide whether running bonzi-buddy is a good idea or not, and just click yes anyway.
No, if you really want to break a system you must push WITH the flow instead of against it, you efforts will then be far more effective if you try to steer it towards self destruction, than if you just stand in it's path and try to stop it, whete it will simply crush you.
No, EVERYONE should come out and start harping on about moores law and data storage densities and pence per terabyte etc etc, and push for ALL data, and I mean ALL data, not just TCP/IP of today, but emerging data such as TCP/IP telephony when BT and ma bell switch from switched networks, I mean ALL television programming, and of course I mean ALL CCTV or indeed any other form of surveilance "footage", yes ALL data, should be stored, IN PERPETUITY, and IN COMPLETE STREAMS, not every tenth frame, and not just headers.
I also want ALL vehicles to be tracked 24/7 via, GPS / GPRS, and ALL CITIZENS TOO.
We need to push for EVERY LAST BYTE to be stored in perpetuity, and we need to push for this by stating (correctly) that ONLY a full data stream tells the whole story.
Once people start to get behind this idea as a meme and take it on board we then need to push the photos
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Actually, one could expect better from the old continent. We have the perfect example of Stasi, East Germany political police that was so effective in gathering information... that it has rendered itself totally ineffective. Stasi maintained an extensive network of informants and in 1980's simply everyone in the DDR was under some sort of surveillance (either himself or at least his neighbor or someone in the family already was a paid Stasi informer). In 1980's Stasi knew everything about everyone exept just one thing - they didn't know what they know. When the Berlin wall fell down, many Stasi secret files were opened - to much suprise, many of them were opened for the first time. The network was just too huge to control itself anymore. The information flow jammed all the available channels. Since everyone was under surveillance, it was almost as if there was no surveillance at all. I thought this will be a meaningful lessons for all the powers that be... but it took roughtly 15 years for European politicians to repeat the same mistake. Oh well.
I wrote a polite, finely worded letter to my local MP (Jim Murphy) in regards to the RIP bill a number of years ago before it was introduced within the UK - and I wasn't even given a response either explaining why the UK should go ahead with the RIP bill or discussing the points I made in further details.
I do intend to write to him again regarding this, however I do not expect to receive a reply or any notification my letter has even been read.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
1. Have you ever gone over the speed limit in a car? Do you want to be monitored 24/7 so if you do, the government can simply issue you a remote fine?
No, I don't want to be monitored, but..it WOULD be fair.
2. Do you mind having government cameras in your home 24/7? How about in your bedroom, shower or toilet? After all, you have nothing to hide. Right? If you don't want cameras in your home, you must be conspiring against the government. Right?
I don't see the connection between cameras in the house and a national ID card as an example. I guess it's a decent point, but a little alarmist sounding (conspiracy theorist like)
3. Why is it that it's ok to have citizens watched 24/7, yet you can't see the footage and for some reason, no politicians seem to be surveilled?
I don't like this argument either. Who would argue that it's not ok for the police to watch criminals? Likewise, if the police was watching you, would you want anyone to be able to download the video off the internet? I don't think so.. Likewise, politicians are probably the most recorded people around.
4. Why shouldn't the insurance companies know about your entire medical, driving and social records, all the time, so they can dynamically adjust your risk status and increase payments as necessary?
Would probably be more fair that way...
5. Why do you need a secret ballot to vote for your politicians?
That's a decent one.
6. Shouldn't the politicians be doing your bidding, not ruling you?
Hmm.. not sure about this one. I elect a politician to lead, not do my bidding. I don't really think that's the point of electing people to office.