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EU Approves Data Retention
submanifold writes "The EU have ratified rules that will force ISP's and other telecommunication companies to retain data for two years. This data includes the time, date and locations of both mobile and landline calls (as well as whether or not they were answered) along with logs of internet activity and email.
Apparently the content itself would not be accessible, merely the data concerning it. However, despite being touted as an anti-terrorist measure, the record industry has already admitted interest in aquiring such data."
Heh, I guess buying stocks in storage related companies would be a good idea now :)
Dvorak on Doomtech
Retain for two, retain forever.
There had better be some incentives for housing that kind data. For a busy ISP, that would mean GBs and GBs of data. Where's it going to be stored and who's going to pay for it?
not in the "Hardware" section, dammit !
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
I guess thats a good reason to start using encrypted proxies.
Free MacMini
...is to publish the surfing habits and email of their executives over the past two years. If they have things like Porn, Payola, and Prostitutes showing up in public view, and they might lobby for Privacy.
Seeing that many people have been harassed by the FBI and similar entitys just because they belong in a certain group (peace protestor, black, etc.), I really do not want the government to find out that I from time to time engage in peaceful marches agianst the man. As noted, the record industry wants to have a look at the data, and that is just another pen stroke to accomplish after the money has passed under the table.
Dvorak on Doomtech
If the music industry is the biggest cause for concern here, we've got bigger problems than we think...
These are likely the same parties behind the push for UN control of ICANN's business.
If you think they're merely out for fair sharing, think again. I may hate the rights I've lost through Bush and Clinton's wars and social programs, but I see no real difference in Europe. In some ways I see fewer freedom and more tyranny.
Open WiFi access points make these rules useless.
Yet again politicians (and their advisers) demonstrate their complete lack of understanding in the field of IT. They obviously have no comprehension of the quantity of data that TelCos shift each day...
Now we should be able to round up all of the terrorists within a few minutes, and all will be well in the garden again. I am so lucky to be looked after by such wise leaders. Seriously, I bet you will be able to count the number of terrorists caught by this on the fingers of one foot.
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
That's fine, and is their right.
It only becomes a problem when the authorities grant them access. They ask all they like, as long as they don't get it. If they do get it, then it's the authorities that should be blamed.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
In order for this to happen, you have to stop supporting them. Don't buy (or download) their products. Don't listen to their mass marketed drivel. Tell your friends, your family, and everyone else you think will listen that every time you support these companies, you are chipping away at your freedoms.
As long as the majority of us continute to pay the record industries money, they will simply continue in their quest to make sure that we all pay them more money. If we stand up for our rights, stop buying their products, and make sure that they realize that they are here to sell entertainment to us, and that we do not exist to buy entertainment from them, then that will be a start.
All this talk of "screw them" and "I hope they die off" and whatever else will do nothing to protect our rights, especially when governments are making it easier and easier for these corrupt and greedy companies to infringe on our privacy.
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
Either way, the customer is screwed.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Let them blame it on piracy then. They can whine all they want to, but whining will buy them but so much. If they use piracy as an excuse to DRM stuff, then we don't buy the DRM products, and they go out of business. Companies who avoid DRM will survive and eventually they'll all get the hint.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'd have put this under YRO.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
You may think it, um, counterintuitive.
But the _reason_ they want these is to maintain social/political power over people. An elite with privileged access to all that information can control society. In a free society, either everyone should have the communications metadata, or no-one: It's unbalanced information availability that would give the police power to become the classic Big Brother. I'm a lot safer if everyone knows I have a particular embarassing sexual inclination or whatever than if only a small, powerful subset knows.
See David Brin's book "The Transparent Society: Will Technology force use to choose between privacy and freedom?"
There is no way to stop this now. We're on our way to an Orwellian state.
This is the fundamental step. From here on, it's let's add this crime, let's give access to that organisation, let's extend it to this data, let's save it for 100 years instead.
And when there's a war, the occupier will have the ultimate oppressive weapon pre-installed.
And what are you people babbling about? What protocols will be included, ways to obfuscate yourself, the costs of storing this data? There's a bigger picture, people!
Say what you will about the US, atleast they don't have a back door for legislation that would never get by a national parliament. Make room, I'm hopping the pond.
The recording industry has no business in data collected for anti-terrorism purposes.
Unless the recording industry is taking responsibility for issues that belong to the government.
But in this case the recording industry should have the same burden as governments: their leaders should be elected by the voters.
"logs with ports and IPs"
No ports, no IP's. The folks who came up with this don't think that far.
They think that:
- e-mail is just like phone
- spam does not exist
- ISP's only handle private traffic
- ISP's handle ALL traffic, and have full access to it
- Only EU citizens use ISPs in Europe
- Encryption does not exist
- No-one has his own mailserver
- No-one is going to try to make money by offering tunneling services to non-EU countries
- Terrorists are dumber than they are
It's not that they want every ISP to scan all packets. They're just thinking like lusers. They think internet is managable.
Their plan sucks. It doesn't work, it's leaking like a raincloud, it's unconstitutional for a lot of member states, and they bombard ISPs with costs, work and responsibilities they never asked for and they KNOW is bullcrap.
It's absurd.
Google has assets in the UK, and does business in the UK. We can tell them to "obey UK law or go home and stop doing business here". China did it, and so can we.
Hang on - did I just compare my country to China? 8-O
It wasn't just that the data wasn't retained, the data was never even collected unless you requested it -- otherwise the only billing information that would be kept was a running counter.
Today, the supposedly-democratic countries want to use surveillance that would have given Gestapo and Stasi wet dreams; it's probably no coincidence that the prime ministers in the countries that have pushed the most (UK and Sweden) have been ones acting like power is a God-given right to them personally.
Ok, assume the following scenario:
We catch a terrorist. I'm not talking about somebody we just think might maybe be a terrorist, I mean we yank him out from behind the wheel of the van bomb in the basement of the skyscraper, or the other passengers monkey-stomp him unconscious as he tries to break into the cockpit of the airplane.
We search his home, and find a computer. On it, we find an email from Ayman Al-Zawahiri, saying "Abdullah will email you the instructions for where to pick up the anthrax." We don't find a copy of the email from Abdullah, and Thunderbird is configured to always prompt him for his Earthlink IMAP password. When we ask him for his password, he says "your mother sews socks that smell". After we type that in, we find out that it's not actually his password, it's just an insult.
Are you saying that you don't think it would be a good thing if we could go ask Earthlink for a list of everybody that's emailed him in the last two years, and cross-reference that with emails received by other known terrorists? Maybe go talk to anybody with the address "abdullah1987@hotmail.com" who emailed him?
If what people are objecting to is a feared misuse of this information, then oversight and legal protections are a better answer than throwing the smoking baby out with the bathwater.
If you honestly think it's not safe for a private company to have this information sitting where a court-granted search warrant could retrieve it, then you probably need to be lobbying to replace your local landfill and garbage trucks with curbside incineration service, too; but don't imply, as the submitter did, that it's not an anti-terrorism effort just because it could also be misused.
This is akin to deciding that a school isn't being honest when they say they're buying new computers for educational purposes just because some kid says he's going to install Quake on one of them.
The Directive will be rubber-stamped by the Council. It will be challenged in several national courts and possibly the European Court of Human Rights, for it breaks article 8 of this convention quite flagrantly.
But there appears to be no process for overturning the directive. EU directives override national law. This is a great success for the UK government which tried and failed to have this law passed in the UK.
Ironically, a report by the Commission just 4 years ago on the Echelon surveillance system stated quite clearly that "Only in a 'police state' is the unrestricted interception of
communications permitted by government authorities."
The EU is now officially a 'police state', by the Commission's own words.
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You're lucky. I can't stand the kind of music that's on the radio. Internet radio works, though. Combine that with a ripping program (recording stuff off a broadcast is legal so I don't se a problem here) and you can get some passable music together.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.