Slashdot Mirror
UK Child Abuse Investigators Resent Being Charged For ISP Data
nk497 writes "In the UK, ISPs are charging a child protection agency for access to IP user details they need for their investigations into online-related abuse. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre has paid out over £170,000 since 2006 on IP data requests related to child abuse cases, and expects to pay another £100,000 this year — enough to fund another two investigators. The CEOP's CEO said that any ISP which can't afford to give the police such help 'simply can't afford to do business.'" Surely it must cost the ISPs money to comply with such requests, no matter how official the quest.
First off, when did it become private enterprise's problem to pay for law enforcement?
There is obviously a cost of some form to the ISP for providing this information, and it seems fair that this cost should be passed to the law enforcement organisations to be serviced out of their budget - this is what their budget is for. If it's not sufficient, they should lobby for it to be increased via taxation or other methods.
The telcos are already allowed to charge for providing background information - and this is as it should be. If information is made available freely and at the drop of a hat to third parties then it encourages misuse of that information and encourages scope creep to monitoring a wider population than you might originally have required.
Cant the UK govt legally steal it via some regulation that allows it?
Our govt is immune from copyright and patent infringement, and only listen to "entertain".
Any chills protection agency who can't afford to help ISPs with the costs of THEIR investigation simply can't afford to do business
TIAEAE!
They requested data on at least 3,000 people from the ISPs (at £60 per request). But assuming most ISPs don't charge them then the real number is likely significantly higher perhaps even over 10,000 requests... That's a lot of requests.
As far as the charges go... I like them. It forces the police to at least look at how many people they're requesting data on so they just can't put out a drag net to see what they catch.
Plus it does cost ISPs money.
The ISPs should not be cooperating with pseudo-government institutions who want to know the addresses of people who look at album art on Wikipedia.
It does. And don't call me Shirley.
I'd say A few pounds per person is a very small price to pay to ruin someone's life.
Many innocent people are accused and even convicted of "abuse" of children, only to be exonerated after their businesses have failed due to boycott, they've lost their jobs, they've been driven from their communities, they've spent years in jail, etc.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The costs of this seem to average out at approximately £18 per query, which is less than the amount that can be charged for a "Freedom of Information Act" request, so the ISPs definitely are not gouging the investigators.
It also definitely does cost the ISPs money to obtain the specific requests, so by any measure, they should be able to charge. If they're suddenly expected to donate their time for free "because of the children", then surely the investigators should be expected to do the same (how would they like their job to be suddenly unpaid)?
This token amount, though small, operates as one of the balances to ensure that investigations are at least slightly sane, otherwise I can see requests flying out on every person they can find, simply because there is no reason not to.
From reading the figures, the information gained from about 10,000 requests was useful in about 240 arrests. While a little on the low side for hit rate, it does show that they're targeting the searches at the moment. Long may the targetting, rather than scattershot fishing expeditions so favoured by digital enforcement agencies, continue.
Well the frist sensible decision which involves children in a decade. As other posters have pointed out it is not the (direct) responsibility of businesses to pick up the tab for crime fighting irrespective of how vile that crime is. This is just another one of those quasi-governmental bodies the UK is so fond of throwing it's weight around.
Personally, I'd like to see more crime fighting measures costed out like this. Perhaps if the public got to see how much these stupid wars on X, Y and Z cost they would grow up a bit and realize that there will always be bad people in the world and, with finite resources, you are only ever going to limit their number.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Unless CEOP's CEO works for free on this worthy cause then why does he think other people should ?
Everyone gets the same deal.
Pay the bill... ignorance of the technology is no excuse...
The answer, which won't happen while the Civil Service is run by Civil Servants, and while the government is run by politicians, is either to roll back the SIs and rely on properly thought out laws, or to require that any SI must first identify all funding issues required and explain how they are to be addressed.
My favourite idiotic SI is the one passed a few years ago, under which it is now illegal for, say, a professor of electrical engineering to rewire his or her own kitchen or bathroom, while the same job can be done by an unqualified trainee who merely works for a registered electrical contractor. That's typical of Civil Service thinking: don't look at the job to be done, look at the paperwork.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
and expects to pay another £100,000 this year - enough to fund another two investigators.
Let's see, 100,000 / 2 = 50,000. Unless the living costs in the UK are much higher than in Denmark, or the British pound has tanked more than I'm aware of, that would seems to be quite a decent bag of money you get as such an investigator...
If the law was passed to make it free the first thing the child protection agency would do is request information on everyone. This would bankrupt some ISPs and force others to increase prices. They would probably put a request like this in every month and arrest hundreds of people who followed those nasty links that slashdot (and other) trolls like to put in their posts - then shut down the browser as soon as they realise it is not a computer related site.
I rewired my own kitchen perfectly legally. I had to pay 100 pounds to the local Buildings Control Office who sent someone round to look at it. He knew very little, but it was pretty clear to me that he was really there to figure out if I knew what I was doing - if he got a bad impression, he'd send an electrician round.
Part P has got a bit of a bad press, and certainly bad implementation by many councils. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it isn't quite as idiotic as a lot of people make out.
The real story here is how the agency obviously thinks it can frighten ISPs into giving them a free ride, by invoking the dreaded paedo-bashing tabloids. Pretty shabby behaviour.
The UK government uses 'child protection' to justify a wide range of authoritarian measures. It's even better than 'national security' because, after all, only a witch would defend a witch. Burn them!
Presumably they won't have this problem from March though when everyone using a British ISP will have their Internet activity stored on a government run database.
All the other UK law enforcement agencies pay ISPs for investigation, and have never raised a stink about it. The only reason why this has become news is because child abuse is a highly emotional and touchy subject here in the UK at the moment.
As bad as child abuse is, what good reason is there for giving the investigators cost benefit over, say, murder and rape investigations?
Whats next? They resent having to purchase the fuel to put in their squad cars, the electricity they use, the water they use? Use bandwidth, pay for it, that includes police. It is actually important that they do so. This keeps them from just assuming everyone guitly and spamming their way across the internet and crippling networks.
If the ISP didn't charge for something like this, they would be inundated by requests from law enforcement, and others. The $$ keeps the agencies from making frivolous requests.
The CEOP's CEO said that any ISP which can't afford to give the police such help 'simply can't afford to do business.'
If the police can't afford to pay for the ISP's time, perhaps they simply can't afford to continue their witch-hunts against teens doing what teens do or works of pure fiction.
Can ya hear the violins, CEOP?
Hey, we'd all love to see actual kiddie predators burn at the stake. But we also know that 99% of these "child protection" laws exist to make it difficult or embarassing (or sometimes even illegal) for adults to see or do things that society (C.1690) has deemed of questionable morality.
Incidentally - I did have a professional involvement in this as a member of BSI electrical safety committees in the 80s and 90s. Did you know that the Government would not make the Wiring Regulations statutory, against the advice of their own experts, because of resistance from the electrical installers?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Part of the reason why this type of legislation gets passed is that it provides extra income for government. Every transaction is taxed. If legislation forces an increase in transactions then it follows that the government will have increased income.
The fact that you now have to get a qualified electrical contractor in to check your wiring means more money for the government.
As a by product, it also provides work for more civil servants, thus increasing the size of the huge tail of workers who live off the back of the core providers in this and many other societies.
Charge a fee of $100,000 per customer.
It is unnerving that your privacy comes with a price tag, but at least if it were more expensive, you could hope that law enforcement agencies will only request it if they're really, really sure they need it.
What really happens, judging from the news, is that ISP data gets requested at the drop of a hat, houses get searched, computers confiscated and reputations ruined - only to follow up with a lame apology if the whole thing turns out to be baseless again.
For what it's worth, I work for a small UK ISP, and we have never charged them for this data.
I can't speak for other ISPs, but it really isn't a difficult thing for us to pull up the required data.
I don't know which ISPs are charging, but I don't believe it's justified.
... & I'll say it again today. The UK is goosestepping toward fascism.
There is a war going on for your mind.
And likewise, Jim Gamble could probably manage on a 10% pay cut.
It's a government agency. If you're using services of private companies then you need to pay them. Some might offer the service for free, but the police have to pay for everything else they use.
It is absolutely standard practice that people like expert witnesses (and telcos etc.) have to be paid for their services. It worries me that these clowns seem to have zero experience with the courts.
Gamble compared CEOP's work to transport police, who are allowed to travel free on trains. [He said:]
"They won't have to buy a ticket to get on the train - and you compare the train system to the online network; they won't pay or have to cajole or convince the conductor to give them the information about the threatening person who's in the carriage down the back"
A person with no command of analogy should not be allowed to hold down a desk job.
Perhaps they should fund it from all the CRB checks that have to be done. I've recently (in the last 2 years) had to have 3 full extended CRBs done for different organisations - they couldn't accept ones done for another organisation.
[phone rings]
Ford: Hello, fleet sales. How can I help you?
Police: The Met here, we're after some new cars. About 20 mondeos, we were thinking.
Ford: Estate or saloon?
Police: Hmmm, ten of each.
Ford: To you squire, bulk discount and you being on the level and all, I can do that for [tappety tap tap] 400 grand.
Police: But it's for the children!
Ford: Well why didn't you say? Have them, just have them. Do me a favour and take them off my hands. I'll throw in a full tank of fuel and fluffy dice.
Police: You're a gent! Careful how you go now, sir.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Please excuse my ignorance but why is UK's current situation so touchy with child abuse?
Has there been an abnormally large number of abductions recently?
Did a large pedophile crash against a building?
Our society(s) are going to have to accept the fact that even this modern world can be a dangerous place. We have become so insulated, and mind you I'm not trying to argue for some Quaker type of lifestyle; I fully love progress/tech/etc, by our progress that any small hint of danger is blown way out of proportion.
And then you get the "won't someone think of the children!" crowd who take this already exaggerated situation and blow it up to the nth degree...well you get what we have here.
And this may seem a bit tangent but I'd argue that we really need to use our progress to push our frontiers, IE space. Without any real frontiers to remind us all that life can be dangerous it's far too easy for people to slip into a very 'safe at any cost' mentality.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Do they resent paying for petrol to drive to cases? Surely any garage that can't afford to fuel their cars for free can't afford to stay in business.
As an aside, what makes you think the law actually stops an unqualified person, who is not even likely to know the law exists?
This is a general issue with laws that make something an offence which most people would not understand or know about. Viruses and Trojans on the Internet are more likely to make criminals of non-IT-literate people. As the network of enforcers widens, more and more stupid, incompetent and malicious people join their ranks. These people then use their arbitrary power to upset other people for pleasure. They won't succeed against real criminals because they know enough to hide their traces (like cowboy electricians knowing where to buy old stocks of installation gear from before the cutoff date so the householder can claim it's an old installation...)
When you sell your house, it gets surveyed.
And no, it's NOT the EU. This kind of silliness is something our legislators can manage without any outside help.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I see that I've modded down as "flamebait" - I don't know whether to be annoyed of amused.
So, is a call to be more reasonable now "flamebaiting"? Or was it because the modder didn't actually read the text any further than to object to words like "moan and whine"; and then of course the terrible heresy of stating the opnion that a government agency may in fact be right once in a while?
Happened recently in the US and there were patents taken from the owners for aircraft to be produced for WW1.
In the US.
Why are some random kid's interests of being protected regarded more important than my interests in my privacy being protected? Bold statement? Explain that too, why is someone whose education costed less than mine (by definition, mine consisting of more years than a child, being less than 18 years old, could have gotten) more important than me, who can, unlike said child, contribute to the nation's GDP.
Yes, I don't give a rat's ass about your kids. If you can't protect them from harm, you are to blame. Not me. It is neither my responsibility nor of any interest for me to protect your kids. Protect them if you can. Hire someone who can if you cannot. If you can't either, find a solution.
"Thinkofthechildren" is maybe the most surefire way to argue if you want me to disagree with you!
So, now mod me flaimbait and let's go on with the story. I got karma to burn, and I am really, really fed up with the whole "protect the kids" crap. I can't hear it anymore. All sorts of insane laws cutting into my privacy are passed with the all powerful "save the children" argument. So far I only don't care about your kids.
Continue, and I'll probably hate them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or are they profiting from the child pornography?
More child sex predators scare. I keep on wondering about why they do this and I know why now. They can't really do anything about the real face of it. They're all too afraid.
...
I'll tell you something interesting: No stranger can hurt you as much as mom/dad can. Strangers are easy to single out, but no one wants to think about what goes on behind closed doors. You can get over occasional molestation a lot easier then being shut in a room for every day after coming home from school and being convinced that you're worthless.
The truth is too scary, so it has to be strangers, school teachers, etc
To all of these agencies: Thank you for all your wonderful protection from the scary strangers.
I'm a bit rusty, but isn't all this data stored in /var/log/ files and there's a tonne of scripts out there to audit it ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
"Please excuse my ignorance but why is UK's current situation so touchy with child abuse?"
Because there was a case here recently of a seventeen months old baby being tortured to death over a long period by his 'care givers'. Despite the fact that he was on the 'at risk register', at no time did the social services notice a broken back. See also here where a mother fakes the kidnapping of her own daughter.
Every so often the nation works itself up into a paedo-panic. Some time back it reached the heights of the absurd where a pediatrician was attacked in his own home. As someone else pointed out, a kid is more likely to be abused by a relative than some total stranger. So, if you're a male of a certain age, don't talk to kids in the street, don't have them in your home, never give your daughter a hug and never let your daughter climb into your lap and under no circumstances be alone in a room with her.
"that's the thing about wasps, they love animals, can't stand people"
davecb5620@gmail.com
What? People pay for IT work? Thats ridiculous. Bunch of 70s pong playing punks! Since when do pay kids to play with computers!
The resistance of the installers made it more difficult to conduct business. *ducks*
...because of resistance from the electrical installers?
Oh, I see what you did there.. no?
If society wants these things investigated, then society should pay the cost of the investigation. What's so hard to understand about that?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I'm all for it. ISPs should have to work for free because we should all "think of the children". But, there's an even better way to make the money stretch further. Instead of paying the agencies employees (such as this CEO) they should just provide them with food, uniforms for clothing, public bathrooms/showers, and cots set up at the police station. Sure, it's not as nice as what they have now, but if he's truly dedicated the cause, this guy shouldn't have a problem making the sacrifice in order to provide more resources to the effort.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Some history. Back in the 1980s, when Guliani's people and the FBI were investigating the New York Mafia, they had lots of wiretaps. New York Telephone billed them for each one as a dedicated line. The phone bill was over $1 million per year. On one occasion, the FBI didn't pay the bill, and the automated billing system then billed the person being wiretapped.
Back then, wiretapping wasn't built into the US phone system. It took manual wiring in the central office to patch in. So it wasn't done casually; there was paperwork and billing, and the wiring involved had to go into the cable database. The FBI lobbied for the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, which required carriers to build remote wiretapping capability into phone switches.
The FBI had also, on a few occasions, used the ALIT (Automatic Line Insulation Testing) system for wiretapping. This was a hardware setup in central offices which could connect to any line and checked for opens, shorts, resistance to ground, and such. Normally, it connected to idle lines for about a quarter-second, ran some tests, and disconnected. It could be used to listen in, though, which got the FBI the idea for dial-up wiretapping. Each switch had only two or three single-line ALIT units, (early versions had two racks of HP test equipment connected via HP-IB) and a wiretap tied up all that gear for long periods, interfering with its normal wire testing job, so telcos hated it when the FBI wanted to use it.
That, plus Bush I, got us built-in wiretapping.
Just increase the voltage. That will keep them on their toes.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Last time I visited Britain the prices looked the same as in America - but they were in Pounds instead of Dollars. Which suggests to me that the Pound was greatly overvalued. This will make imports more expensive, but exports more profitable for Britain. (Does Britain still make anything that anyone outside Britain would want to buy?)
The CEOP's CEO said that any ISP which can't afford to give the police such help 'simply can't afford to do business.'"
IT workers are generally compensated fairly well, and are usually short handed. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most IT orgs can't afford to have their admins drudging through data by request without any compensation.
Sounds like you need to call on Harry Tuttle to do the work for you. That is assuming Information Retrieval doesn't realize/realise you have bypassed the paperwork at Central Services.
Did you know that the Government would not make the Wiring Regulations statutory, against the advice of their own experts, because of resistance from the electrical installers?
So they really are required to fill out the 27B-Stroke-6 form *before* they tear apart my apartment to fix the wiring?
The State must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation. ~Adolf Hitler.
I hope to everyone's consternation that this hits close to home.
Yup - these kinds of practices are common on this side of the pond as well...
My favorite is the "National Electric Code" (TM). It is a copyrighted set of codes governing electrical work, which is essentially made a statue in most areas of the USA. The problem is that it is a copyrighted work that you can't obtain freely (as in speech - you can get some limited access to it free of charge under certain conditions). Sure, for $100 I'm sure you can buy a copy of it somewhere. What I object to is the idea that the law has essentially become copyrighted.
If I wanted to I could make an annotated copy of the Federal Register or the Constitution or whatever and explain how the folks running the show are a bunch of clowns. That would be completely legal and a form of free speech and protest. If I were to do the same thing with the National Electric Code (TM) then I could be sued, because it isn't public property. And yet, it has the standing of law in most jurisdictions.
Legislative bodies should be forbidden from incorporating copyrighted works into laws by reference. If they want to codify the NEC then they should just quote the whole thing verbaitim in a bill, and then it becomes public domain.
There is a discrepancy here
No there isn't.
if they pay more, then the state has to charge more in tax, so what do you want? Higher taxes, so ISPs can charge more? Or that CEOP tries to save money while still doing their job?
What I want is the real cost of government to be reflected in what it charges (taxes), so the people have a really big fucking price tag to look at when assessing the value of yet another increase in government scope and power.
By rolling the cost of nearly worthless* witch hunts like online predators and the like into ISP service, it's hidden from the people paying for it. I want the true cost of law enforcement to be paid by direct taxation, so that we can have sane discussions about scaling it down to reasonable levels.
* Yes, damn near worthless. If you really care so much about saving the children, take all children away from their parents at birth and have the state raise them. The overwhelming majority of abused children are abused by relatives. If you're not willing to take this step, you are *not* interested in addressing the "problem" and obviously have some ulterior motive.
The UK Police charge GBP 80 for their accident reports, but they don't want to pay 20 to 60 for an ISP report...
What makes these people think that other peoples work is not as important as theirs? I work for a large ISP and CLEC. It takes manpower and time to answer these subpoenas that they send us frequently. Why is it that anyone should consider that my time working on collecting this information for them is totally without value? If I can not charge the agency that is requesting the information I have to pass the cost along to the customer. That's right, I have bills to pay too and if I am busy looking up information for some government agency, I am not working on the things that make the business run. That means now I need to hire someone to do that work. If the agency does not pay, then I have to raise the prices to the customers to pay for that extra help. Inadvertently what they are doing is taxing you without going through the proper channels, and making their budgets look much leaner then they really are. Any time that someone questions our policy of a nominal fee for this work I simply ask them if they are working on this case for free or if they expect to get paid. When they say that they are getting paid, I simply say "so am I". Anyone can run a successful lemonade stand if they don't have to pay for lemons and sugar.
I used to work as a law enforcement liaison for an Australian ISP (now a Sysadmin at the same ISP) and we don't charge for law enforcement requests unless getting the information costs us a significant amount of money (i.e. retrieving older data from off-site backups) and we would never charge any of the child abuse protection agencies.
Stunning effect!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Does the CEOP's CEO get paid or does he do this for free? I sure he gets paid most likely very very well too. If he or anyone gets paid at CEOP they need to shut the fuck up.
So hey asshole we like to get paid too and if we work for free for every paid asshole like you coming around looking for freebies you are right we could not stay is business.
We have bills too that must be paid so pay your fucking bills so we can pay our bills.