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ISPs in Argentina Must Log Everything
hjf writes "According to a new presidential decree, and effective July 31, 2005, telecom carriers in Argentina will have to log every activity, including Internet chats, website visits, e-mails, phone calls, etc, made in Argentina. The data must be stored for 10 years, and must be available to the police and intelligence agencies within one hour, 24 hours a day. The telecom companies must pay for 'everything': software, hardware, and human resources, and will be required to use state-of-the-art technology as soon as it is available. This news was known already in specialized circles, but only yesterday it was published in major media. This is causing outrage among legislators and businessmen. Lawyers claim that it violates privacy laws and Constitutional rights (article 14), and the 'presumptive innocence principle' (innocent until proven guilty)." (The Fish comes in handy yet again.)
That's absolutly rediculous! who funds that project of data storage? Sure, storage is cheap, but what about a whole country on an ongoing 10 year window?
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
tunnel everything through SSL or SSH.
That the US isn't that bad after all.
I certainly don't agree with new "security" laws like the Patriot Act, but the Patriot Act beats the hell out of this.
...is suddenly in need of IT people. Too bad it will last only as long as there's capital around to support it - money out of the pockets of the customers.
There's something to be said about the usefulness (to law enforcement) of user activities to websites and such. So you can prove... what, exactly? That a person at a location visited a particular website, at a particular time.
Informatus Technologicus
As I recall, the British proposed some similarly silly rule requiring ISPs to "log everything" about 5 years ago.
I haven't heard of it since, so I presume the proposal died a whimpering quiet death unclaimed by anyone.
Free from any requirement to compromise, the Argentine president looks to one-up their old nemesis (of Falklands/Malvinas dispute) by actually trying to revive this rotting corpse of an idea.
What's next for Argentina? A clipper chip?
Of course, none of this compares with the tragedy of decades under juntas and the legacy of los desaparecidos.
Not to mention the economic collapse from naively expecting that IMF policies and democracy can co-exist.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
because, communications in Argentina are private. just like in the US, the police can't just go into your home to check for a bomb, or just tap your phone line because you *may* be doing something illegal. For this to happen, you need a court order. This new law demands that everything should be logged, and available to the police whenever they need it, so it means, you're an automatic suspect because you use the phone.
In Argentina, they now have to log the content of the connections, not just the information on the connections themselves. Basic difference between recording (A) visited website (B) and recording (A) visited website (B) and here is the webpages he downloaded (the pages themselves have to be saved, not just the URLs). A difference of several orders of magnitude in information.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Ignorant legislators making a poor country poorer.
Simple Math proves how this is impossible with humans working, and nearly impossible with computers.
Lets say 1 person uses the internet, and this person spends 2 hours a day on the internet (email, browsing, whatevering)
It would require the police >2 manhours to understand what was going on and itemize those 2 hours of internet usage. In addition if branches were found(other suspects of interest), it would require another >2 manhours of work.
Multiplying this by the number of days in a year, and it can been seen as quite the impossible task.
Even programming a computer to automagikally scoure the entire 10 year database would pop up 10000's of hits on a name, and the policec have to investigate the likely ones. Again even if 1% of all the traffic was deemed "interesting" you are still talking greater complexity than can be handled by traditional methods.
Forced by econmies of scale, in this case, the more cases, the more expensive it becomes to processes.
Won't last, Already when people talk about terabyte drives, they are capapable of storing (YEARS?) of audio, which no person could listen too. Ever. Just like all the books in the NY public library, too many books. Too many books.
Too much content to read folks
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.