Irish GSM Providers Asked to Track Users' Web Use

With the disclaimer "I'm both Irish and work for the EU Commission," reader VShael writes "The head of the Irish police force has requested that Irish cell phone providers (Vodafone, 02, Meteor, 3) retain detailed information on the web pages that people view over their handheld devices. This information would be held over for 'possible future criminal investigations', but would be gathered without a warrant, probable cause, or without the citizen being suspected of a crime. This request goes way beyond the European Union's data retention directive, which never included retention of web-based email. Representatives of Vodafone, O2 and 3 discussed the letter at a meeting with Mr Davis (6th November 2008) and questioned the legal basis under which they could retain this data. It is their understanding that the content of calls or e-mails, or details on webpages browsed, are excluded from the EU directive. As such, any retention or disclosure of that information would be a violation of existing EU data protection legislation."

Comments

Re:Encryption

[theapeman]

It would be very easy for an ISP to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on supposedly secure sites which use self-signed certificates. Self-signed certificates provide some security against eavedropping by third parties, but almost none against a malicious network. They can only be useful if you have some independent method of verifying them, and very few people would know how to do that. (Of course, that also applies to certificates signed by many certifying agencies - it is probably quite easy to get a fake certificate that will be silently accepted by browsers)

Re:Encryption

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Nonsense, you can easily detect if someone forges certs in a man-in-the-middle attack by comparing signatures after the fact.

But you can't detect massive dragnet surveillance of the type actually being carried out by government organizations.

Let's not confuse some theoretical, hard-to-do, impossible-to-get-away-with attack from what is actually happening in the real world now.

Rich.

Re:Universal law.

[tyresyas]

Yes, but they are ubiquitous among common law legal systems that can trace their heritage to England's.

I'm getting sick of this

[hyades1]

It's 'way past time the service providers grew a set and sent a resounding "Fuck you!" to these fascist pricks. And it's also 'way past time those of us who live alleged democracies to start demanding some privacy protection. I'm a lot more frightened of Big Brother than some whack-job terrorist. The terrorist might manage to kill a few of us. Big Brother will sit down hard on ALL of us and never, get off.

The best I ever heard it put was by an English commentator. He said we need to recall that the freedom we're so thoughtlessly flushing down the toilet isn't even ours to give away. It was bought and paid for with the blood of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.