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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.)
tunnel everything through SSL or SSH.
in other news every argentinan isp got fucked in the a**.
and downgraded every connection to 0.2kbyte/s in order to be able to comply.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...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
Here's a log for ya:
....
11 April 2005: (Email Traffic: Detected. Web Traffic: Detected. Chat Traffic: Detected.)
12 April 2005: (Email Traffic: Detected. Web Traffic: Detected. Chat Traffic: Detected.)
13 April 2005: (Email Traffic: Detected. Web Traffic: Detected. Chat Traffic: Detected.)
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
The price for a dial-up account in Argentina just jumped to $3.99 for the first minute, and $1.99 for each additional minute.
No, it just means somewhere else is worse.
It's tragic. Laugh.
`We see about 20-30% of our total world-wide production of hard drives being sent to Argentina in the immediate future to fullfill the needs of this decree. After all, a slow cable modem at 1 Mbps can download 10 GB of data per day. Multiply this by ten years and by the many many people in Argentina who have broadband access, and it's a lot of disks' --Some guy at Maxtor.
Does the ISP drive a truckload of mag tapes around to the Ministry of Information and say "Off you go chaps, analyse this!"
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
My i2p node is up and if I could so would freenet.
Perhaps mod offtopic if you feel the plug isn't worthy.
Not that either of these technologies can do much against 10 years though...
A blog I run for the wealth
Easier way to drive them nuts. Create an application that creates a file containing completely random information. (I've done this before, it's easy and doesn't compress well). Set up a program to automatically send these files to a friend who then creates a new one and sends it back. Automate and repeat 24 hours a day on a broadband connection. Should rack up the TB real quick.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It's not just Internet related data either. Companies shred internal memos and tax records and the like after a predetermined amount of time as well, for the same reasons.
Ignorant legislators making a poor country poorer.
Fifteen years ago I moved to Argentina and lived there for 10 years. The government and police are extremely corrupt, almost mafia-like.
It's every [extended] family for themselves... they have clubs where you go barter for stuff with credit chips because the Argentine peso is worthless.
Ironically, I moved out right as the dollar became uber strong when the peso was devalued...
But I don't think this decree will amount to much do to the sheer impracticalities and economic costs of implementing such a massive log system. ISPs will either do their utmost to avoid following this to the letter, or go out of business.
P.S. People in Argentina don't care much about privacy in general. For instance, they literally have no concept of personal space and will stand like 1 cm from your face while talking to you.
The unofficial
I haven't heard of it since, so I presume the proposal died a whimpering quiet death unclaimed by anyone.
Unfortunatly The Resolution of Invesigatory Powers Act 2000 was actually passed. I hate this country sometimes. As far as I know the "log everything" part has never been implemented. For "technical reasons", i.e. it's fucking ridiculous. I can't find any mention of it more recent than this article
sig
Silly Argentina. You can't just start out logging everything. Start off slow by relaxing the laws a little to combat something, lets say child porn. Wait a few years, add a couple laws for terrorism and walla, you can do whatever you want.
Hacker Media
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.