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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.
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!
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?
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
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