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EU Data-Retention Laws Stricter Than Many People Realized
An anonymous reader writes with a snippet from the Telegraph: "A European Union directive, which Britain was instrumental in devising, comes into force which will require all internet service providers to retain information on email traffic, visits to web sites and telephone calls made over the internet, for 12 months."
First po<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
There seems to be something wrong with tha href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
Internet records to be stored for a year.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Looks like they forgot to
Here ya go.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Would require their ISP's to retain a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105 too. Its just common sense, really.
If all they have to retain is an a href link to an article on the Telegraph, I'd rather call that a victory for privacy campaigners everywhere.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
All but Content, will be kept in a Teleco archive says... My foot I say... Who watches the watchers dear? Spam might proove usefull after all! Three witches watch three Swatch watches. Which witch watches which Swatch watch?
Or else It gets the hose again?
Anonymous Coward
I think this makes absolute proof that none of these "editors" actually exist. They're all scripts.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I think this is three years in the EU.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
You were here to see it.
Thanks for your nation building projects, Eurolovers. Now you have gotten us the panopticon state, and it is never going away. Surveillance, once implemented, has never in history been cut without social upheaval.
Hundreds of public bodies and quangos, including local councils, will also be able to access the data to investigate flytipping and other less serious crimes.
So how many people will post on a website or email their friends to say "we just dumped the old sofa in someone's driveway"?
Mods accidentally the whole href!
If I'm using Gmail for email (using SSL) and am in the UK, does this directive affect my email?
Obviously my ISP won't be able to read the headers and Google is a US company, but is my data still stored in the UK and if so does it fall under the directive?
I think I accidentally the post.
I am convinced that I can always be convinced otherwise.
Only hosers get the hose, which can really hose up your hosing day.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Does anyone know how this is supposed to be implemented and how it relates to "arbitrary" data passing through the system? For example, email "headers" are supposed to be logged. One might imagine this being done by logging smtp, pop and imap transactions. But given that almost everyone I know uses webmail these days, and given that web traffic (presumably monitored using transparent proxy servers) is only supposed to have the URLs logged, not content, how does that stack up -- especially when you throw SSL into the mix? Are ISPs legally required (even if it's technologically unfeasable -- that's never stopped the law) to inspect HTTP transactions to see if it's webmail passing through, and log the recipients? Or is this just a humungous loophole for webmail hosted outside of the jurisdiction? Also: how does it affect non-UK citizens whose services are hosted by a geographically-distributed provider who might have nodes in the UK or at least the EU?
This is so obviously not about preventing terrorism or saving the children.
All it is is to give the police an easy tool to bring proof to whomever they want. Also this cost will be higher your ISP bill, as they are the ones who must pay it. The provider XS4All used to have a counter on their pages on how much data they would need to retain and we are talking about enormous amounts of data.
The excuse why this must be done is often that the police is able to get your phonecontacts from the telecom operator (after legal intervention).
There however is a huge difference. The reason that the data of who you called is available is because of billing. Somebody must pay the call you made, including those to 800 numbers. So what they do is ask to see (part of) their bill.
This is different in such that they not only enforce measurements to be taken by companies, they also make it almost so as if telecom operators would record each and every conversation.
What they should do is, just as with telecom, ask for billing information and if they think there is more to it, listen in on the connection. Oh well, everybody is guilty untill proven innocent, no matter that the law tries to tell you otherwise. Well, unless you have a lot of money, then you are innocent.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
To retain a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105 ...?
Oh, I get it. Haha. Nice late April Fool's joke, Slashdot!
No, if you look at the submitted article, on the firehose link, it's fine, correctly formatted, if a bit verbose. It took a human to fuck it up.
My provider just upgraded to 120...oh Internet Service Providers, what are they gonna use it for?
The country is full of terrorists, child molesters and subversives and something has to be done about it.
This being the UK, government needs to be able to track down and follow dangerous people that might endanger the social and political stability of the country, like: members and supporters of anti-war movements, ecologist movements, free-speech/privacy movements, Tories, Lib Dems, Scots, Welsh and Irish nationalist parties, teenagers ('cause of knife crime), investigative journalists, anybody that makes request under the Freedom of Information act, people that complain about the government, anybody that talks too loud in a 1 mile circle around Parliament, whistle-blowers of government wrongdoing and more.
As usual our masters, being wiser than everybody else, have gotten their laws passed using the EU so that they can blame it on the European Union - a trick that always works with the unwashed masses around here.
All hail the fascist-Labour party!
[Having been born in a country under a fascist dictatorship and having been raised hearing my family's stories about it, it's impressive how things in the UK are slowly moving towards a modernized version my mental image of how it was - in the UK we now even have police adverts pretty much telling people to denounce their neighbors.]
If every Britain ran a high definition 24/7 Web cam then the ISPs/government would be struggling to keep all that data, and since porn is pretty much illegal now in Britain; the ISPs would likely be breaking the law in quite of few of these cases. It's always nice to know that the government, by necessity, would have an unofficial backup of my favourite download; the movie 2 Girls 1 Cup.
Did anyone of the legal bodies (is it me or does it sound like dead weight for some reason?) ever think of the amount of data this would create? And that somewhere, somehow, this data has to be stored?
The average "browser connection" (i.e. opening a webpage) opens, considering all pictures, ads, links, redirects and other crap nobody wants or needs, about 10-20 connections. All of which have to be protocolled, filed, stored and archived. If you open a hundred pages per day we're at 2000 connections, and thus lines in the database, per day. Or 360,000 entried in the 6 months period that is the lowest storage period as by the EU directive.
Every single person using the internet.
This is all assuming that we're dealing with pages that are heavy on text, contain few pictures and that you don't use any goodies that start following links to precache them in case you might want to follow them. Else, multiply by 10.
Add now the lot of infected spambot machines that create a multiple of that connections per second, and I question the technical (and economically sensible) implementation of this project.
But that's what you get when you have politicians making laws without consulting those that are still here in reality.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7985339.stm
How has noone realised this.. There is no democracy in the UK.. It is a Dictatorship anyone that doesn't believe me I have 1 question for you: "Do you remember voting for Gordon Brown to be PM?"
On the plus side I have a server in the USA, so it's time for me to setup a VPN connection to it and use it as a proxy.
Most of these have been tools for privacy freaks and people with something to hide. Running them is enough to raise suspicion. But these kind of data retension measures are much more likely to force such tools to become mainstream. This could backfire on law enforcement and security forces in ways they really don't want.
I host a website, and run some mail, off my end of the DSL cable, yet I'm not an ISP - I do not route traffic, really, nor do I have any customers. Does this law apply to me too ? Or do I just have to assume that my ISP duly filters my traffic ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The text of the directive is available (External links in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_2006/24/EC) for everyone to draw his own conclusions. For the most part I find it pretty reasonable. ISPs and telcos probably already store this type of information for their own purposes. It also limits the detention period (at least six months, less than two years).
GCHQ is watching you too. No pressure. Have a martini.
It's quite surprising that such an error can stay on the front page for this long. Don't the editors actually look at the site at all?
Wow this is very invasive.
"Hundreds of public bodies and quangos, including local councils, will also be able to access the data to investigate flytipping and other less serious crimes."
quangos - non-governmental organization performing governmental functions.
This could mean deputised cyber vigilante groups targeting anyone who visits a website, posts on a forum or has a link to someone of interest.
Gathering data like this is fine for the security services. With MI5/6, Scotland Yard or some task force you *should* face a day in court.
Even with MI5/6 rendition, a member of the house may ask after you and after a few years you get to face a real UK Embassy official.
The problem with the UK system is 'anyone' interested can see your usage data and get a mob at your door.
If you sell up, your guilty.
If you stay you have a good lawyer.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
In fact, with that malformed summary I doubt it's even transitional.
Are you guys trying to get me to join a cult with a
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
Idiot! He's obviously referring to the miniature version of cow-tipping, which is quite popular in Europe.
It's pretty sad that a story featuring merry ole England once again coming up with new ways to oppress its citizens and continue their steady march to a tyrannical fascist government doesn't even surprise me anymore. Any guesses towards how long till people start running around with Guy Fawkes masks and blowing shit up?
There is a simple protection to this, get some noise software such as this one:
http://madebits.com/webnowse/index.php
And leave it running all the day. It makes random requests all over internet. No one can then tell what you browsed.
Don't the editors actually look at the site at all?
You *ARE* new here, aren't you? :P
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
"will require all internet service providers to retain a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105"
If all the EU is requiring is for the ISP's to record 1 URL for a year... I mean I'm pretty sure you could save that into a read only text file and just let it sit around forever.
Like Ron Popeil says, "Set it, and forget it!"
There is a simple protection to this, get some noise software such as this one:
http://madebits.com/webnowse/index.php
And leave it running all the day. It makes random requests all over internet. No one can then tell what you browsed.
This won't do any help in fighting terrorism. Instead, it will allow an easy route to blackmail people. Like, we will present some evidence about your infidelity to your wife if you don't cooperate with us.
Yes, secret agencies were able to do that even before, but now, when such logging becomes mandatory, even telco technician will be able to get the history of your communications.
FSF, EFL and other organizations should do everything to develop and promote technical solutions that would render this logging useless. We should start using encryption even for most trivial tasks.
No sig today.
Won't somebody think of the href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
Lets see, 1mbit adsl2 upstream.
256 char long random urls.
Add tcp/ip/http overhead, thats 1000 urls a second.
Make a nice screen saver that does this, give it to 2000000 people, = more HD space than they can purchase with using 2million dollars a day.
20000000 Gig a day = 20000tb = $2,000,000. Not to mention the physical space and power usage, 200000 watts daily added?
* 365, I doubt they would spend 400 million pounds, zero raid on that.
But I could be wrong, Hitler ruined his country 'policing' his people, yeah fat load of good that did, what a looser, and all his hench men and idiot subservants scum.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It's the brits that are always pushing Europe into their nightmare surveillance society. No other country in Europe has nowhere near as many CCTV cams, by several orders of magnitude.
As far as I'm concerned, you can GTFO and keep your Thatcher (isn't that witch dead already?) and your Coalition of the Willing to Bend Over.
Perhaps someone here can tell me is there a way I can avoid being logged...? Can I change DNS servers, use Tor, or some other trickery? It's not that I do anything inherently bad on the web - just that I resent where I go being recorded. Any thoughts?
They will simply won't have slightest idea how to use these data usefully. It will be abused and finnally revoked.
Unfortunately people in power NEVER learns. Because we let them to skip that.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
This seems to be a very US centric website.
After lights out time in their parents basement, its a good nights sleep for the editors.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
FOURTH CHANNEL, txtfiles.org, Sunday (NNN) — Logs of email, web usage and Internet phone calls will be stored by Internet service providers from Monday, per EU directive.
The Home Office said it was the UK Government's priority to "protect public safety and national security and, of course, our own jobs. The records are safeguarded by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to only be accessible in the direst of need, such as when your arsehole neighbour tells the council you're using their bin."
Social network users responded with outrage. "Liek, wtf?" said KT Myspce. "I put up pictures of me pissed on a public website run by a commercial company and the government looks at it? I'm defriending Jacqui Smith right now. Cow."
Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group said it was a "crazy directive" with potentially dangerous repercussions for citizens. "The mental health of the civil servants reviewing the data is in particular peril. What is seen cannot be unseen."
The initiative was welcomed by Internet users Bob Goatse, Boxxy Tubgirl and the Lemonparty Collective. "We look forward to introducing ourselves to even more wonderful Internet users," said two girls, handing reporters a cup. Spork shares were up 5% in early trading.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
...is some way of sending email to random people to clog up their logging servers and make it difficult, if not impossible to separate the real content from the garbage. I hear there are some enterprising individuals who have been running a pharmaceutical mail order business based on that concept, maybe we can ask them for some advice?
--frank[at]unternet.org
The Conservatives in Britain often make better noise on privacy issues. They are also, in complete contrast to the US, the responsible party about the climate change threat. But where are they really coming down on this incipient fascism?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
This is old news.
I worked on a project in late 2007 that implemented this at a huge ISP. We were an ISP to ISPs. The main team, based in the US, implemented a system that parsed email logs for our ISP partners in Europe and provided the email header data to law enforcement in the UK and France. I didn't work on the software, so I don't know the exact specifics of what was and was not filtered. In fact, I never heard anything about a filter at all.
Are any of you wondering why email should be encrypted anymore?
So the home office thinks a targeted advertising system like Phorm is necessary and proportionate?
Who the fuck is this twat? This guy is basically saying that everybody with a letterbox or who may hand deliver a reply to correspondance is providing a mail service to the public.
The UK's retention regulations reference the communications act 2003, the relevant section of which reads as follows...
So there's no statutory legal requirement for private operators to retain data. The bill mandates retention of data relating only to communication services provided for use by the public. Operators of public web forums may have to comply but the majority of private companies with in-house email/web infrastructure will remain unaffected.
Bring back the log printers. Write the logs to continuous paper and let it spool down the garbage chute into the coal basement. If the police wants to see the logs, send them to the basement.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Hmmm... that VPN service from The Pirate Bay doesn't look quite so paranoid now, does it? :) Seriously, we really need to get encrypted connections going. VPN is even better, they can see you connect to the VPN host, after that, all traffic is encrypted and tunneled. Or there's TOR and such.
You win the Internet!
John Henry, is that you?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
We in the swedish pirate party currently have over 21,000 members including our youth-organization.(http://www.piratpartiet.se/storlek)
We also accept international donations. :)
(http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate)
I would have agreed w/you a year or two ago. OMG! Another dupe?!? WTF do these monkeys DO when they are busy 'working'?!?
But then I saw the firehose andplayed with it for a while. It dramatically changed my mind, and explains why sites like digg often seem like broken records, with the same stuff getting front paged over and over every few days/weeks/months.
Imagine seeing the same thing, over and over and over again, worded slightly different each time. Did you see that story before? Well, yes you did. It is one of a hundred candidates for reading/posting.
But here's the kicker: did you post it? When you see the same crap over and over, by the hundreds, day after day, that can be a very, very tough question to answer!
Respect our editor overlords. Love the editors!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
What about the mail systems in MMORGs.
What about the chat or emotes in WOW.
Do we need to log every Chuck Norris joke spammed on the trade channel in Stormwind?
Perhaps someone here can tell me is there a way I can avoid being logged...?
You could always look into RFC 1149. It's supposed to be well nigh untappable.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I seem to recall a rather more blunt quote, but since I unfortunately cannot find it, the official ICO response to the proposals was:
Incidentally some may find the ICO's press release list (the source for the above quote) makes for some interesting reading. Surprised there is no follow-up to the debate though, I'd have thought he's try to get his oar in again.
Just kidding. They simply didn't bother with the debate: "Civil libertarians are outraged that the change came into force without a debate in parliament, having been brought in by statutory implement". (statutory instrument info).
So, it would appear that firstly they sneaked the EU directive in by calling it "commercial" legislation rather than a policing one. This forced themselves to implement it, but allows them to blame it on the EU, even though they were the ones pushing it through there. Back home, they proposed a Bill (which would result in an Act, a "proper" law by "proper" means IMHO), started the normal proposal procedure, but then didn't like what they were hearing so chucked it through as a statutory implement instead. Nice.
Oh and by the way, since people seem to be avoiding it, the names of the directives & law are, I think:
UK SI The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009
(Also see Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
EU Directive is EU Directive 2006/24/EC[PDF]
(doubtless there's a raft of other legislation of varying degrees of relevance)
Because clearly, Liverpudlian street gangs use the Internet to organize their activities. Using "think of the children" to justify your totalitarianism is one thing; cynically dredging up the memory of one of the most brutal and horrific crimes of recent years to do it shows their contempt for all things warm and human.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Especially the porn.
Which we paid for.
Are they trying to bankrupt themselves? Thats an unthinkable amount of data. And a huge amount of equipment. And will have a huge environmental impact. I hope they cracked cold fusion cause they will need it to run all the data centers they will need.
If you are interested to follow the votes of the European parliament, check out epvote.eu