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EU Moves Forward with Data Retention
KokoBonobo writes "
euobserver.com reports on controversial proposals to require EU service operators to retain data about telephone calls and e-mails as part of an overall fight against crime and terrorism. The retained data would not only consist of logs, but of entire conversations and contents of the e-mails and SMS messages. This document from the European Commission's Information Society goes into further detail."
Actually, I only think the ones doing any encryption will be the ones that the government/police would actually be interested in tracking.
The majority of people don't care about this. All too often have I raised the question of whether society is getting too "big brother"'ish - most responses I get indicate that the average Joe is ready to give up personal freedom in order to feel just a little bit safer.
That's just the way people see it.
-- A good compromise leaves everyone mad. --Calvin and Hobbes
Practically, does it make a difference? Most (not all) companies will turn over whatever information they have about you to the government if they have even so much as a pen pointed in their direction. About the only time you'll see a company refuse a government request for a customer's data is if they feel it will somehow be financially beneficial to do so.
Don't forget eBay's statement from last year: "If you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details--all without having to produce a court order."
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
and I am going to say it again!
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin To the world governments:
Please Leave us ALONE. Your forms of protection, infringe on our freedoms, maybe there wouldn't be a terrorist issue if you weren't so controling. Maybe if you didn't try to impose your morals on the rest of the world, there would be no reason to "rise up against $nation".
Where, at what point, did things go wrong?
I really don't know, but as long as there are more than 2 beings in exsistance, one will try to dominate.
42 69 6C 6C 20 47 61 74 65 73 20 69 73 20 61 20 77 68 6F 72 65 21
The EU has the largest economy in the world right now, so not joining may hurt a country.
There are other markets, and for the time being, you can still trade with the EU, even if you're not a member, can't you? Or are they to the point where they try to blackmail countries into joining?
The danger of the EU isn't in it becoming a great economic power, it's in it turning into a political organization, which it will do, if left unchecked. If the EU decides that it's for the best if Country X shuts down all its farmland and converts to manufacturing, then farmers will lose their land under eminent domain and be forced to either move somewhere else or become factory workers. With enough economic power and a little bit of political power, it's a Socialist organization in everything but name. If that's what the people want, then it's none of my business to say otherwise, because I'm not in any danger of ever falling under the EU, but the people won't have a say in it whether they want it or not.
I have to thank the people who are bringing out this legislation. This is exactly the type of thing that motivates me into learning new topics like encryption and so forth. I haven't thought much about encryting my communications or data up until right now.
As soon as they put obstacles in our way we must find ways around them.
I try not to rant and rave about this, to my non-nerd friends, but sometimes I just can't help my self... but it seems nobody really cares. They will just mumble something like "but think about the children" and surrender their freedom. Damn.
Anyway, I've all but given up, except I digitally sign (s/mime) all my mails and I've a pgp key that I'll use when requested.
Now digitally signing my mails may not seem like much, but I don't know a single other person (Nerds/Geeks or not) that has a digital signature, so I can't encrypt (I've one work colleage with a pgp key). But sometimes somebody asks me what that strange symbol by my mail is about and I have an opening to talk a bit about security (I often add something about spam), but I still haven't managed to get a single other person to get a digital signature.
Not that I've anything sinister to mail about, but I just want to keep those NSA servers busy. Trying to break a 2048bit key, just to get to a message about soup.
TC - My Photos..
For the sake of argument, ignoring phone records, etc and just focusing on the internet.
There are over 100 million broadband users in the EU - plus countless milllions of dialup users - but we'll ignore the dialuppers too for the moment.
Now I download about 300Gb/year and upload about half that. So we'll say about 400Gb/year of traffic. Now I know that they only have to log the traffic and not store everything I download/upload (although that would make for a more amusing example) so let's make it 1/10th of that actually required to log all my data (40Gb).
That's 3.7 Exabytes of data per year for all the broadband users in the EU alone. Assuming they haven't changed the proposal too much since I last read it, they required storage of data for 7 years, that's ~26 Exabytes of storage required to hold all this stuff.
How the hell do you find anything of use in 26 exabytes of data?
The US government were originally so afraid of PGP that they imprisoned its author for "trafficing arms". It's probably the most peer-reviewed encryption software in the world.
I'd rather trust PGP than any government-recommended scheme any day. Take Clipper ; the inbuilt key escrow killed it from day one - even PHBs were not going to bend over for that one, given the record of gov.us in the matter of taking foreign trade secrets by surveillance and using them to benefit domestic companies.
so how do i go about encrypting my sms messages?
Acid House saves Souls
The EU is about as democratic as the former Soviet Union. The European Parliament is almost powerless, and the national governments are almost powerless against new European legislation. Those in the US who are thinking Europe's getting it right are sadly wrong.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Some governments are just a group of corporations.
Hollywood shouldn't be able to do its bidding in
Finland.
Denmark is way ahead of the rest of the EU and is implementing a legislation that affect not just ISP... it affect anyone who provide some sort of "tele services"...
So if you run a block, you need to track, register and store everyone who makes a comment on you page.
If you run a BulletinBoard... same applies.
Run a chat or mailinglist? Ditto for you.
Do you run *any* kind of server (apache, irc, cvs, ftp, mailinglist etc.). You're not excused.
In short: every citizen is obliged to keep records of friends, family etc. whereabouts.
Welcome to Stasi-land!
A terrorist's message could be..."Did you hear about thet flood that made people's lives in country X very miserable..."? The hidden message to this would be that "next month will be a crucial one."
You underestimate the intelligence agencies, and the resources they have access to (I'm talking brain-power, not CPU-power). I suggest you read The Code Book by Simon Singh. If you think that using simple word substitition would make your communication secure then you've got a lot to learn. Once you've read about Charles Babbage you'll never think of word substition ciphers in the same way again..
Sure, word substitution in one message may be somewhat secure, but if you start sending more messages using the same system, then you can be pretty confident that someone will break your "cipher" system.
Yup. Probably wouldn't fly in open court, but if memory serves you aren't allowed to tell anyone that the government have requested the key, or else you get to spend twenty years in the clink. I left my tinfoil hat at home today, so I won't comment that this gives "Them" a nice mechanism to lock you up on an unfalsifiable pretext.
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What if you suddenly forget your passphrase? This can plausibly happen in extreme stress situations, such as being arrested, interrogated, and/or threatened to be put in prison.
The RIP bill has been used frequently and even by those who were not supposed to.
When the government sought to introduce RIP2 recently their investigation showed that ISPs were handing over information without court orders and that the law was being exercised by lowly council workers that were not intended to be provided access to users data.