Dutch Gov't Has No Idea How To Delete Tapped Calls

McDutchie writes "The law in the Netherlands says that intercepted phone calls between attorneys and their clients must be destroyed. But the Dutch government has been keeping under wraps for years that no one has the foggiest clue how to delete them (Google translation). Now, an email (PDF) from the National Police Services Agency (KLPD) has surfaced, revealing that the working of the technology in question is a NetApp trade secret. The Dutch police are now trying to get their Israeli supplier Verint to tell them how to delete tapped calls and comply with the law. Meanwhile, attorneys in the Netherlands remain afraid to use their phones."

Comments

You can't make this stuff up

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Absolutely superb.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[rvw]

Absolutely superb.

It's called a Dutch Delete. It helps deleting the case by messing up the evidence.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[laejoh]

I thought a Dutch Delete only applied to torrents?

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[rvw]

I thought a Dutch Delete only applied to torrents?

No no! The Dutch Police used to share all phone taps via torrents, and now they don't know how to delete those. That's the real reason why The Pirate Bay should be shut down.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[ZeRu]

"Meanwhile, attorneys in the Netherlands remain afraid to use their phones." Apparently they need some Dutch courage.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[MrNaz]

Dutch courage eh? /me hands the Dutch legal fraternity a nice, cold glass of encryption.

Seriously, why don't we all just move to encrypted SIP clients? It's not like there aren't a pile of open source ones out there.Yes, it'll never be mass market, but it's now easy enough for anyone clued up enough to know that they need to be using it.

Failing that, there's always encrypted email. Thunderbird + Enigmail is a no-brainer.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[Nossie]

And in related news...

"The law in America says that file sharing hosts and their clients/files must be destroyed. But [what] the Dutch ISP Nforce has been keeping under wraps for years [is] that no one has the foggiest clue how to delete them"

So many levels....

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[ae1294]

Seriously, why don't we all just move to encrypted SIP clients? It's not like there aren't a pile of open source ones out there.Yes, it'll never be mass market, but it's now easy enough for anyone clued up enough to know that they need to be using it.

But then how would big brother monitor our phone calls to protect us from ourselves???

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL - I have the solution:
A mic in every house. Management of the network outsourced to an iranian firm to keep costs down, of course.
Peace and security.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[Anonymous Coward]

Any criminal with more than a couple brain cells would only talk about the weather on an un-encryped phone, regardless any lawyers being involved.
The Dutch government only tapes phones to catch the small criminals, to protect the monopoly of big criminals, like themselves.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFM!

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[s2theg]

Here let me help you with that.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[Lorens]

You don't have to. I bet the calls are saved to a NetApp that has the no-delete feature turned on. Absolutely no way of deleting things short of physical intervention on the storage bay, which would destroy other calls. You would have to copy calls you want to keep to another bay and sent the old one back to NetApp for a wipe.

Cool feature when you don't want to lose things :-)

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Dutch police are now trying to get their Israeli supplier Verint"

ISRAELI supplier.

i.e. JEWISH supplier.

i.e. JEWS.

The eternal jew...

He just can't keep his nose (hooked nose, of course) out of other people's business, nor can he stay out of white people's countries...

I wonder why.

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[Anonymous Coward]

They should hire Danger to run their storage.... They seem to have a good idea of how to delete things....

Re:You can't make this stuff up

[DaVince21]

Indeed, geweldig. Unbelievable.

I know!

[puroresu]

rm filename

Every knows

[Anonymous Coward]

Every knows that you have a very high risk of getting tapped here. At least i'm glad to have a DSL connection as phoneline now, as it no longer introduces those annoying clicks traditional phonelines suffer, indicating recording started, whenever you say numbers, raise your voice or trigger a keyword, as it all is digital. I find it in particular funny to get 'observed' as i got nothing to hide, but just may have a couple 'interesting' friends between my connections. Also, by living in this town for a little, i know about at least 1 person for 100% sure he works for secret intelligence (y, i learned deduce at skool). Call me paranoia or not. I'm knowing for sure me and some friends getting traced, and i don't fucking care except to think of bullshit stories to confuse them. I'l make them easy this time by just publishing my IP: 127.153.231.2. You'r welcome.

Re:Every knows

[badfish99]

Have you tried a tinfoil hat?

Re:Every knows

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever his mental state, according to the official numbers (which don't include the secret service) in the Netherlands the number of wire taps is over 10 times that of the number in the US and we've only got 15 million people...

Re:Every knows

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like they are 10 times more honest about it in The Netherlands than in the US.

Re:Every knows

[BlackCreek]

Some official numbers about tapping in the NL http://www.bit-byters.net/?p=50

Re:Every knows

[ArsenneLupin]

i know about at least 1 person for 100% sure he works for secret intelligence

Only one? I know 3:

1. one is an ex-colleague. Officially he just works for "the State", but "everybody" knows which part of the State he works for, even though he never stops denying it (especially once our local CCC chapter started spreading the same rumor...).
2. Another one is the boy scouts chieftain of a friend from our local LUG. He's pretty open (to us) about it.
3. And the third is the brother of my ex who sank a certain ship, and then was foolish enough to brag about it to his family after he came back from that mission...

Ok, so how long until the subpoenas will start raining in on Slashdot?

Re:Every knows

[locallyunscene]

I wonder how many of the Dutch wiretaps include U.S. citizens and if there any "trades" going on between the U.S. and the Netherlands.

not afraid

[Djinh]

Lawyers aren't afraid at all to use the phone: If a tapped conversation between them and their client turns up later in court, their client usually walks.

Re:not afraid

[ledow]

I think you're only looking at the simple case. What about: I find out the intimate details of what you and your client were talking about on the phone and then use those details to dig deeper and find evidence I never would have without that phone call? Then I turn up in court, destroy your case, have nothing but hard evidence and you have no way of knowing that I used your taped conversation to do so (and probably couldn't prove it even if you thought that).

It'd be immoral and illegal but it *would* destroy your case outright and the chances of me getting caught are probably quite low if I'm someone with intelligence and knowledge of legal workings like, say, another lawyer?

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

The police wouldn't be dumb enough to use that as evidence.

What they are more concerned about is the police hearing "Oh, you did do it? Right, this is how we'll get you off..."

Once they know you did it, even if they can't use that recording, you can bet your bottom dollar they will put every resource to use in finding the proof you did it, where without that taped call they may see no surface evidence and move on to the next suspect.

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be true, but if the police / the prosecution is smart, they don't use the tapped calls themselves as evidence, but simply use them during their own investigation, and to better prepare their rebuttal to the defense attorney's arguments.

Regardless of lawyers' feelings, this is a major violation of a basic right to have a private conversation with your defense attorney. The fact that these calls are tapped at all is outrageous. If those calls were occasionally accidentally stored that would be even more outrageous. But if they are not only recorded but even impossible to delete, ... well I can't think of a word.

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be immoral and illegal but...

Indeed. If we assume that police do illegal things, the laws we have to restrict this sort of stuff mean nothing. In example you described, it wouldn't matter what sort of laws we have about wiretapping.

But honestly, why would police do something like that? They get paid to do their job, they have no incentive to do anything more than they are required to. It's pretty much the same as it is with IT administration. If my boss asked me to look through someone's emails, my first answer would be "I don't get paid to do that. Give me a raise, but that in the job description of my contract and then we'll discuss this again."

I could see some individual cops wanting to break law ("That guy annoys me... Maybe circumventing the rules to get him caught is worth it... Especially as I might get a promotion!") but that's were the bureaucracy steps in. There needs to be *extremely* widespread for such to get authorized, implemented, paid for, the actual discussions followed, etc. without someone asking "Wait a minute. Why are we doing this again?".

Re:not afraid

[dajak]

The conversation between lawyer and client may be confidential, but the extent of the protective perimeter you set up around it is a practical matter.

You may declare prison and law office phones sacred altogether in order to make sure you don't record such conversations, missing a lot of useful conversations, but if you don't, you will have to listen to the conversations to establish, firstly, that it is a confidential conversation, and secondly, that the recording doesn't contain parts you presumably may use (for instance the lawyer dictating something to a secretary in the background).

Dutch practice is that you may not use or store it in principle but you may listen to the recording and store it until you did. After that, you have to destroy it, and the suspicion is now that the system only deletes it.

Having said that, this whole thing became an issue after it was discovered confidential phone conversations were actually copied to DVD by the police in one high profile case, which is indeed outrageous.

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, GP is right. Here in the Netherlands, several cases basically took the course that GP describes.

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is one of whitelisting versus blacklisting.

You're worried about NOT recording potentially useful conversations. That's obviously not how the system should work. I'm worried about recording private conversations in general.

The Netherlands is rapidly moving towards "screw privacy, let's record everything". I'd prefer it if the police only use a wiretap when they have actual evidence that a useful conversation is about to take place.

This has the additional advantage of not generating enormous amounts of useless data which the police are (apparently) unable to manage.

Re:not afraid

[jonbryce]

It's not as simple as that.

The phone call is never going to appear in court. What could happen is that the police listen to the call and then have a better idea where to look to find evidence that will help them with their case. This evidence will be presented to court, will be solid evidence that proves the accused guilt, and there is no way you could prove it was obtained as a result of tapping a privilidged phone call.

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

The police wouldn't be dumb enough to use that as evidence.

Yes, they are that dumb. They actually tried to do that in The Netherlands in a case against the local hells angels club (and the judge threw the case out because of it).

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

The conversation between lawyer and client may be confidential, but the extent of the protective perimeter you set up around it is a practical matter.

You may declare prison and law office phones sacred altogether in order to make sure you don't record such conversations, missing a lot of useful conversations, but if you don't, you will have to listen to the conversations to establish, firstly, that it is a confidential conversation, and secondly, that the recording doesn't contain parts you presumably may use (for instance the lawyer dictating something to a secretary in the background).

The proper term for this is called "minimization", something I hope the Dutch know how to do. Here in the US, Title III wiretaps require that whoever is monitoring the call can only listen to pertinent conversations on the tapped lines. As a result all tapped calls MUST be monitored in real time. Before monitoring, all staff must have be briefed on what they are allowed to listen to.

If the conversation is not related to the crime, the monitor must mute the call and recording stops. (Software vendors usually have to prove that nothing is recorded, otherwise no one would buy their tapping software due to legal issues) The trick is when the conversation swings between pertinent and non-pertinent conversation. There are guidelines for handling this, usually occasionally checking in on the call every few minutes to see if it has become pertinent.

Re:not afraid

[complete loony]

But you would need a plausible reason for finding that other evidence or your case would fall apart. Probably not difficult to manage but you would need to cover your back.

Re:not afraid

[drinkypoo]

It'd be immoral and illegal

Is it really immoral if you're trying to pin someone down for harm done to society? (The potential for abuse is high which is why it's illegal, but illegal doesn't automatically mean immoral.)

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that what constitutes a "harm to society" is more and more defined by corrupt politicians and lobbyists; both of which only act in favour of their own agenda and not the wellbeing of the society.

Re:not afraid

[John Hasler]

Yes. Knowing that the prosecution might be listening, the defendant will be afraid to speak frankly to his lawyer. This will result in inadequate defense and consequently to the conviction of innocent people.

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

In Law and Order it's called "fruit of the poison tree."

Duh!

Re:not afraid

[dajak]

We only have to look at the number of officially recorded wiretaps per capita to see that Dutch (and for instance Italian, Swiss) authorities are indeed two factors of ten more likely to wiretap than US authorities. Monitoring in real time would be too labour intensive for Dutch police purposes.

The wiretaps are in reality hardly relevant for evidence purposes. The police uses them mostly tactically for surveillance of, and investigation into the structure of, criminal organizations. It's a more efficient use of time than following people around.

Re:not afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse, they know your strategy, and or how deep your pockets are.

Game over. Some law enforcement lawyers knowingly break the law - something about getting rid of judges in the USA who were not on side.

Meanwhile in Australia lawyer and barrister offices are not safe from raids, and in camera evidence is even excluded from the judge! Hearsay is now acceptable. Perjury is often unpunished, as is destroying evidence.
Or convicted, then given a presidential pardon if you scooter.

But if you are rich enough, an offshore flight in a Learjet, and in international airspace, tax evasion can be freely & lawfully discussed and planned. The law is not broken, just ask OJ.

Modern lawyers puke over UK law.

Re:not afraid

[NoOneInParticular]

The police wouldn't be dumb enough to use that as evidence.

Ha! You obviously don't know about the utter cluelesness of the Dutch authorities. In actuality, these phone calls have found their way to court in numerous occasions, even to the point that a 3 year investigation of the Hell's Angels was thrown out of court as their evidence consisted of the perps talking to their lawyers.

You see, in the Netherlands the police is stupid, and the prosecuters are worse. The only reason anybody gets locked up at all is because our judges are possibly even more stupid and (still) expect that the prosecution has done their job rather than outright lie. In some cases that fantasy becomes too difficult to maintain, and then a case gets thrown out.

Re:not afraid

[BitZtream]

Immoral? You must be a lawyer. Destroying the defense against a case of a guilty man is not immoral, letting him walk because a law designed to protect the innocent is.

Of course, throwing an innocent man in jail because someone overheard something that misleads others into thinking he's guilty is immoral too.

It can go both ways, but don't paint it as one cut and dried picture. You may think its okay to let someone walk on a technicality or lack of evidence in order to protect the innocent, I however think its immoral that guilty people get to walk for the very same reason.

If you listen to my tapped phone call and get hard real evidence that I'm guilty, you sir, are an idiot if you think thats immoral. Guilty is guilty. Doing it to an innocent would be bad.

You speak like a true criminal/lawyer. Go hang yourself and save someone else the time.

Re:not afraid

[RAMMS EIN]

``That may be true, but if the police / the prosecution is smart, they don't use the tapped calls themselves as evidence, but simply use them during their own investigation, and to better prepare their rebuttal to the defense attorney's arguments.''

Heh. The whole reason they are actually finally looking into this is that many defendants are acquitted because of mistakes made by the prosecution - in this case, not deleting recordings. I hope this shakes things up so that other data retention issues are looked into, as well. What is interesting to see is that actually the government care more about people's privacy than the people themselves - largely, people grumble when a defendant walks, people want more data gathered and retained, etc.

By the way, I was thinking about this issue the other day, and I figured that "letting the criminal get away with a crime because the prosecution didn't follow the right procedures" and "letting the prosecution get away with not following the procedures" are not the only options we have - for example, we could impose sanctions for not following procedures. That way, we can punish both transgressions. It also has the benefit that, for the prosecution, it won't be a "win the case or lose nothing" preposition - they will actually feel pain if they violate people's rights.

Re:not afraid

[SleazyRidr]

Illegal maybe, but it's hardly immoral. How does letting people get away with anything just because they used the loopholes in the system fit into your view of morality?

Re:not afraid

[ibbey]

You may not have been paying attention, but your mother probbly answered your question when you were a child and she said "two wrongs don't make a right".

Re:not afraid

[Fulcrum of Evil]

It'd be immoral and illegal

Is it really immoral if you're trying to pin someone down for harm done to society? (The potential for abuse is high which is why it's illegal, but illegal doesn't automatically mean immoral.)

Yes. The rules are in place to ensure an adequate defense. The whole idea that the ends justify the means is corrosive to a free society.

Re:not afraid

[Fulcrum of Evil]

apparently it does - someone upthread mentioned that the 3 year hell's angels case was tossed because of this.

Re:not afraid

[ibbey]

Loopholes in the system? Illegally monitoring someones private conversations is not a "Loophole", it is a crime . A loophole is when a search warrant was issued, but no one noticed that the court clerk typed the wrong address making it invalid.

The word Immoral may be a tiny bit strong, but this much is true: Any police officer or prosecutor who knowingly uses illegaly obtained evidence in their case against a subject should be fired. Not only do they risk convicting the wrong person (Just because some evidence points at someone doesn't necessarily mean they are guilty... Other evidence may exonerate them), but they also risk having their case thrown out and the real criminal getting away if their shortcut is discovered. Watch the movie In the Name of the Father sometime to see what can happen when a prosecutor gets overzealous.

I expect your reply will be something like "but in this case, you're dealing with the words of the defendant, so they aren't false evidence, just illegally obtained". That would be a reasonable argument in the case of an outright confession on the phone line. In many cases, though, the evidence they gather could simply be something that reinforces their case but doesn't actually prove guilt by itself. For example, his alibi is not real-- maybe he was doing something that he doesn't want his wife to know about at the time of the crime. The lack of an alibi already makes him a suspect, but his lying about his alibi makes him even a stronger one... But neither even remotely -prove- that he committed the crime. If that information is illegally used against an innocent man, he could easily be imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit.

This sort of thing happens all too often in the US. I'm not in the Netherlands, but I suspect that it happens there, too. I completely understand your desire to convict the guilty, but that has to be balanced by the desire to protect the innocent, and locking up the wrong guy for a crime fails that on two fronts: An innocent man is punished, and the guilty man remains free to commit more violence. No one benefits from that situation.

Re:not afraid

[SleazyRidr]

I agree with you that it shouldn't be possible to take people's own words and use it as evidence against them for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Hell, people lie all the time to protect other people, it's not reliable evidence anyway.

Ledow raised the issue of a case where the police use the tapped phone conversation in their investigation and then find solid proof that the defendant is in fact guilty. Just because the police may not have looked there without the illegal information doesn't change the fact that they can now prove beyond resonable doubt that he is in fact guilty.

Re:not afraid

[sjames]

The real problem is if the client tells his lawyer he DIDN'T do it (the police/prosecutor will never believe that) and then tells him about something he withheld from police because it would look really damning.

Then investigators can work backwards from the fact to some plausible way they could have stumbled onto it.

Re:not afraid

[CrimsonAvenger]

Yes. Knowing that the prosecution might be listening, the defendant will be afraid to speak frankly to his lawyer. This will result in inadequate defense and consequently to the conviction of innocent people.

I can't see where the innocent people would be afraid to speak frankly to their attorneys if they suspect the police might be listening in.

I can, on the other hand, see where the guilty guys might be afraid to speak frankly to their attorneys.

But I can't see how guilty guys getting inadequate defense will lead to the conviction of innocent people.

Re:not afraid

[ibbey]

Ledow raised the issue of a case where the police use the tapped phone conversation in their investigation and then find solid proof that the defendant is in fact guilty. Just because the police may not have looked there without the illegal information doesn't change the fact that they can now prove beyond resonable doubt that he is in fact guilty.

But it's still illegal.

What you are saying, effectively, is that the ends justify the means. Unfortunately, once you start down that road, even a little, you can justify all the acts that I pointed to in the previous post. I mean, if the defendant lied about his alibi, he must be guilty, right? And now that you know he lied about his alibi, you can apply pressure to the person providing his alibi (without telling them why you know the alibi is false), who will admit the falsehood, and you can now show in court the the defendant lied. Coupled with the other circumstantial evidence, that's easily enough to get a conviction... Of someone who is innocent.

I know this is a very TV drama sort of example, but these things really do happen all too often. We have these laws in place for a reason. They are not there just to hamstring the prosecution, they are there to protect the innocent. As soon as you start saying it's ok to break the rules since the outcome is positive, you are also accepting the fact that it's OK to send a few innocent people to prison in the name of catching the bad guys. Unfortunately, there is no happy middle ground in this case.

Re:not afraid

[SleazyRidr]

No, convicting people based on circumstantial evidence is wrong, has always been wrong, and will always been wrong.

Convicting people based on solid evidence is right. There is no slippery slope to slide down, because people should not be convicted on circumstantial evidence in the first place.

Now

[MistrX]

Wait for the claims against the state!
Is this already on failblog?

Quick and permanent

[Anonymous Coward]

drop database;

Easy

[L4t3r4lu5]

Take media with recorded conversations, place in a pile, load it up with a half-tonne of aluminium filings and iron oxide, and apply a high temperature heat source.

You might want to wear safety goggles.

Re:Easy

[calmofthestorm]

Make sure to grind the aluminum oxide and iron filings very very finely, this is a mistake that beginners often make and then it doesn't work. I personally recommend a fine file, but this will be SLOW.

Re:Easy

[MichaelSmith]

The best place to set fire to your mixture is in the basement of your houses of parliament.

Re:Easy

[N!k0N]

best to wait til the 5th of November if you're going to do it that way....

Re:Easy

[L4t3r4lu5]

What, no abandoned tube line?

Re:Easy

[qc_dk]

No way. I know my history. I'm doing it the 4th.

Re:Easy

[Ultracrepidarian]

Shouldn't that be aluminum filings and iron oxide? Perhaps sarcasm was intended.

don't tape

[Anonymous Coward]

So then the only way to comply with the law is to not tape them in the first place.

Re:don't tape

[Sique]

If you automatically tape every phone call on a certain phone, you have to sort later (and according to the law delete calls from and to the lawyer).

Just put an average user at the console ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and tell them that there's no way they could ever delete anything. Trust me, they'll find a way.

So many telcos

[AHuxley]

Use Israeli telco supply firms for outsourced backend billing and interception.
Fox new did a report on it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kle7ZgmFcpQ (pt 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeaXlrldqwo (pt 2)
Why or how so many national telcos let interception drift away from core in house responsibilities is just strange.
If your an attorney and your client is literate, buy a note pad, write out your work, read and then destroy (with a few pages under the written page too).
With fusion centres in the US and any suspect now a "terrorist" most of the attorney client privilege protection is getting blurred.

Re:So many telcos

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course "securesuite.co.uk" is Israeli - all your VISA card transactions going through a server beyond the reach of European Law.

Re:So many telcos

[ShakaUVM]

>>...revealing that the working of the technology in question is a NetApp trade secret

Apparently, there IS an app for that.

>>With fusion centres in the US and any suspect now a "terrorist" most of the attorney client privilege protection is getting blurred.

Well, I certainly hope they keep those terrorists away from the fusion centres!!

Re:So many telcos

[AHuxley]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center
Sort of like NSA meets army meets FBI meets NYPD meets you and your lawyer.
Under section 802 its "any action that endangers human life that is a violation of any Federal or State law" and the full force of the the US gov starts to warm up around you and your lawyer ;)

Re:So many telcos

[ShakaUVM]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center
Sort of like NSA meets army meets FBI meets NYPD meets you and your lawyer.
Under section 802 its "any action that endangers human life that is a violation of any Federal or State law" and the full force of the the US gov starts to warm up around you and your lawyer ;)

Whoosh. Fusion Center:
http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/alcator/intro/info.html

Re:So many telcos

[chill]

Last time I worked on it, Verint only made the front-end software. That is, the software that you entered the warrant and details on. It then passed the tap information on to the actual telecom system, which in the case I was dealing with was developed by Chinese and Indian programmers.

Telecom software is usually run by code from companies like Ericson, Siemens, Nortel, Motorola or Alcatel-Lucent. The Verint stuff is just the GUI and passes the instructions on to the actual system that does the work. Call recordings are stored by the telecom system, not Verint. Yes, the delete command is in the Verint software somewhere. They customize for each vendor.

In the case of Alcatel-Lucent stuff, you can force the issue by just doing an rm -rf on the data directory -- assuming you have access to the system in question, which is heavily restricted.

Re:So many telcos

[AHuxley]

"passed the tap information on to the actual telecom system" and "just the GUI and passes the instructions" is the best stuff.
You can have all the local "heavily restricted" you want.
If the entered data is going around the world, whats at the other end?
Who wrote the back end or hardware side is fixed and set in place.
The tap information shows who your interested in, why and who else might be connected.
Its show the officer/s and department and type of tap.
One person, one state or roving, friends too?
The idea that that quality of data floats around with third party non nationals via public or private corps is rather silly.
All you need is a friend on the inside of this distant corp or an outside intelligence service to copy the data in real time and search for a number of interest.
If a friends number shows as been of interest to US or EU law enforcement ... make a call and the suspect walks away every time.

Re:So many telcos

[chill]

Well, the entered data isn't going around the world. The data entry consoles are restricted as well, though nowhere near as tightly as the actual hardware. The data is usually entered by a law enforcement officer on a terminal in their station. Connections for everything are IPSec tunnels, so no snooping.

Still, it would be about as secure as the criminal record check or license plate check computers. That is to say, only officers, friends, friends of friends, connected PIs and lawyers, family, friends of family and politicians can arrange for a peek.

any slashdot reader surprised?

[kubitus]

Israels IT industry is world champion in wiretapping everything.

And I am not sure if they are interested in having tapped calls deleted

I mean really deleted!

Re:any slashdot reader surprised?

[MadKeithV]

void DeleteCall(Call *ip_call) { ip_call->SetVisibleFlag(false); SendCallToEchelonServer(ip_call); };

Re:any slashdot reader surprised?

[eggoeater]

Ya know those "call may be monitored and recorded for quality blah blah" announcements you always hear when calling pretty much any company?
Most of that is done by Nice recording company, based in Israel (they sell the machines; they don't do the actual recording themselves.)
Every air traffic controller in the WORLD is recorded on Nice machines. They are HUGE.

So, yeah, Israelis know a thing or two about recording a phone call.

If they can't delete them....

[syousef]

....the system is probably a piece of shit built by incompetents. What are the odds they can even find them after 3 years?

On the other hand perhaps they can delete them but they're claiming not to be able to so they can hang onto them.

Either way police that don't comply with the law, or incompetent fools - not good.

Re:If they can't delete them....

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens if they created a system so good at backing itself up, we can't ever delete anything off it?

Could God create a system so good at backing up that not even he could delete calls off of it?

Re:If they can't delete them....

[ubrgeek]

Apparently so: The Bible

(yeah, yeah. I know. I'm joking).

Re:If they can't delete them....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a bug. It's a feature!

Re:If they can't delete them....

[Anonymous Coward]

>>....the system is probably a piece of shit built by incompetents.

Citation Please

Re:If they can't delete them....

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the odds they can even find them after 3 years?

Google search.

Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure

[MichaelSmith]

rm -rf /

Re:Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure

[ta bu shi da yu]

I was thinking a large hammer would do it... or run over the device with a tank.

Re:Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure

[Z00L00K]

A nice little woodchipper would do the trick.

Re:Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure

[Linker3000]

Store the data on your Sidekick device?

Re:Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure

[Proteus Child]

# shred -f -n 7 -u /mnt/netapp

Re:Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure

[mwvdlee]

Or here's a nice idea; "DON'T USE THE ILLEGALLY TAPED CALLS".

Yes, I know that sounds obvious, but the Dutch police HAS used such calls. Several cases have been thrown out in the past due to this and who knows in how many cases it WASN'T discovered.

The problem is that when they finally do figure out how to delete the illegally taped calls, will they delete them?

Re:Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure

[Mr Z]

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Re:Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure

[poofmeisterp]

They are... That's why they're waiting until 2012. Du-huuuh. :>

No joke, it's hard

[Odo]

Deleting data is really really hard. If one is storing large amounts of data it is difficult to put a system in place which can prove that every copy in your posession has been deleted. Think about the work of sifting through thousands of write-once offline backups, be it tapes or CDs or whatever, locating the data, copying the original minus the data and destroying the originals. If that's not hard enough, what about data that's not in discrete files. Say there's a PostgreSQL database that's zipped and spans a thousand peices of physical media. The only way to delete a record is to load the whole database then redump it. And don't forget about regenerating all the index files. And dealing with obsolete file formats.

This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[petrossa]

And, the Netherlands have about the most all encompassing citizens database on the globe. So all data is cross referenced all over the place amongst databases of all civil governmental and semi-governmental agencies . It's so vast that indeed it's not only hard, but virtually impossible to remove data completely. As an example: The colour, structure and density of pubescent children is stored. All this data is directly accessible via the misnomed 'Citizen Service Number'. We dutch tend to call it the 'Citizens Spying Number'.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[Sycraft-fu]

I think what it is easy to forget as geeks is just how hard everything works to keep data. All our technology is designed around the assumption that you never want to lose any data. Thus completely removing it gets harder all the time.

As another example snapshot backups are now real common. NetApps can be configured, and often are, to take periodic snapshots of your data. That way, if something is accidentally deleted or modified, there are point in time shots to go back to. Likewise Windows Vista and 7 now keep revisions of files automatically. If you change a file, a new version is written and the old one is kept, by default, so long as there's free space on the drive.

Now none of this is stuff you can't turn off or remove but it is all stuff that adds to the complexity. Just deleting the file, and even overwriting it, doesn't necessarily do it. The computer may still have a copy. It is designed such to try and keep you from losing your data accidentally.

None of this is to excuse the government, if they have a requirement to delete these things they need to work out a way to do so, however that doesn't mean I don't sympathize with the problem. It isn't trivial to ensure all copies have been delete and have been done so in a provable fashion.

This is why when we surplus old computers, the harddrives never go with. They are taken to be wiped and/or destroyed later. We are just not interested in screwing around with making sure the data is gone and then screwing that up. Instead a simple visual inspection tells you there is no data (since there are no drives).

Re:No joke, it's hard

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds as if they may have employed a NetApp archival technology called SnapLock Compliance. If this is the case, they will not be able to delete the data, by design. All media upon which the data resides, would need to be destroyed. The product is designed and sold that way, and I am sure the admins knew that from the beginning.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[noundi]

Deleting data is really really hard. If one is storing large amounts of data it is difficult to put a system in place which can prove that every copy in your posession has been deleted. Think about the work of sifting through thousands of write-once offline backups, be it tapes or CDs or whatever, locating the data, copying the original minus the data and destroying the originals. If that's not hard enough, what about data that's not in discrete files. Say there's a PostgreSQL database that's zipped and spans a thousand peices of physical media. The only way to delete a record is to load the whole database then redump it. And don't forget about regenerating all the index files. And dealing with obsolete file formats.

This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.

Which makes them look even more dumb for not asking how difficult/expensive the task is in the first place.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[dissy]

This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.

I really can't believe I'm saying this, but this sounds like a technical problem that really does need a legal solution.

You are quite right regarding how difficult it can be to delete every copy of a piece of data, on the technical side.

Instead of all of that, it might be easier to enact an actual law saying a recording of a conversation is only legally valid for that time. Or at the least, have both. Then if one side fails you, the other hopefully will help pick up the slack.

No calls recorded before that time would be admissible in court, releasing calls recorded before that time would result in fines and/or further punishment, and if someone attempts to use a recording in court that is older than allowed, the entire trial is up for being dismissed.
I'm sure I am missing other problems that still need addressed, but you get the idea.

I realize a technical solution would be best, as one can not assume a law will always be in place, always followed, and never changed or twisted around based on the current politics of the time.
However as we have seen, even technical measures can be easily bypassed if it fits someones political agenda to do so, with the convenient excuse of "I don't know how those computer things work, we had no clue it was doing that!"

Having both in place would make it easier on the technical side to not constantly worry if every copy is destroyed.
If the telco can easily have a datestamp pop up, and it is beyond the retention date, they should have every legal point on their side to tell the law enforcement or court requesting the recording that it does not exist (even if that isn't the truth technically)

The technical policy must remain however, to help ensure people don't try to find a way to skirt the law.

In the US legal system, there have been times where one side of the case knows without a doubt that they are not allowed to present a piece of illegally obtained evidence to the jury, but does so anyway, with the hopes that the jury will form an emotional opinion on that evidence before the judge instructs them to ignore it.
I would assume that is one of the more important aspects that a pure legal solution can not solve, so will still need the data destroyed in the end.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[RMH101]

They may have bought this app *deliberately* to stop deletion of data, and maintain an audit trail: say for example they wanted to ensure that no-one could run a tap, then delete the evidence that it'd been done - this might even have been a legal requirement.
If the law has changed since then, changing the requirements, then sure they need to go back to the vendor and ask what can be done about it. To be honest, if the alternative is that an operator can casually alter the audit trail and delete records, I'd prefer this option.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[Filip22012005]

Would it be possible to encrypt all the mediafiles and keep the keys in a separate database? That way one could just delete the keys to make the data impossible to recover without actually going through all the tapes. Of course, you'd keep a backup of the keys, but that would be much easier to keep track of.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[John Hasler]

> No calls recorded before that time would be admissible in court...

Recordings of lawyer-client conversations are already inadmissible. The problem is that there are plenty of ways for the prosecution to use them that do not involve producing them in court or even admitting that they exist.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[John Hasler]

There are many possible solutions, but they all involve actually thinking through the the problem rather than blindly purchasing an off-the-shelf "solution" from the vendor with the smoothest salesman.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[Dragonslicer]

So for things like snapshots and file versions, you obviously need a way to delete this data. I'm curious, though, if copies of the data only exist on tapes or discs stored in some large warehouse where it would take 5 years to find the specific data (i.e. longer than a trial would last), is that close enough? If the data might exist somewhere, but there's no reasonable way to get it, is it considered effectively deleted?

Re:No joke, it's hard

[Luminary Crush]

Making sure that the data blocks which represented a file are *really* gone might not be the problem here. When a file is deleted from a NetApp (like it most other operating systems) the data is not scrubbed, but rather the directory entry is removed and the blocks are free to be written over again - they are returned to the 'free block pool'. However, it's not possible to 'undelete' a file on a NetApp - there is no such function (though perhaps NetApp does have such a tool in-house) and there are no third-party tools because NetApp does not allow the installation of any third party software (it's not possible to install any third party software packages because the OS is completely proprietary - eg not built on Linux or Windows like most other storage vendors - and completely locked-down).

Deleting a NetApp snapshot is not hard at all. There are technical reasons why a snapshot might be 'busy' - such as during a mirroring operation, or being used as the basis of a LUN clone - but that can all be readily resolved with someone who knows just a little about Data OnTap (NetApp's operating system).

The problem might be that they have some kind of compliance requirements and are using NetApp's SnapLock Compliance, which will *not* allow you to delete data, period. It's a software module which makes volumes WORM-compliant to the satisfaction of several standards organizations and makes it such that data can not be deleted before the expiration time set for it.

I would imagine IF you had the Data OnTap source code and tried hard enough you could find a way to delete files thus protected; nothing is impossible of course, but would in fact be hard. No reseller like this Israeli organization is going to be able to help them... that would have to come from NetApp.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[Kabuthunk]

Zuh? Why in the world would you go to the effort of copying all files from a tape drive except what you want deleted to somewhere else, and then destroy the physical tape the 'to be deleted' file is on?

I mean, I'm not a programmer by profession (although I have dabbled in it for years), but I can't imagine it would be that hard to make a program that writes over the data of X file with zeroes. *BAM*, problem solved, no wasted time or items.

Isn't there even a contest of some sort in which a hard drive is overwritten using a *nix command for overwriting it with zeroes that noone has ever recovered data from? Ever?

Hell, at the bare minimum, go with your original theory of copying the 'good' files elsewhere, and then use that 'overwrite' command on the tape! There, reuseable!

Re:No joke, it's hard

[Anonymous Coward]

a) One can't write zeros over data on a CD or other optical device. These are literally Write Once Read Many media (WORM). Archival hard drives are often configured in hardware to be this way too so as to guarantee against deletion.
b) Backup tapes (the type used for bulk backups of petabyte-class data, not your home or commercial grade stuff) are also designed to be written to only once. They have high speed read and write cycles, there's no random access or random writing available. Overwriting is not advised if the new data is to be preserved with confidence. Back in the days of VCR tapes, TV studios learned quickly that a used tape did not store a high quality image, so they only used new tapes.

Re:No joke, it's hard

[Anonymous Coward]

As an example: The colour, structure and density of pubescent children is stored.

Err. What?

Wish i was surprised...

[Veneratio]

But im not, really. Having worked for the Dutch police twice now, I can safely say that the majority of their IT staff are completely clueless. A few years ago they "outsourced" their IT to a seperate entity to handle all their IT, but this entity was staffed mostly with the people they already had, so there wasn't any actual increase of knowledge (as far as I could tell). They got a nice fat bag of money and an unclear manifest, all paid for by us - the Dutch taxpayer - and this is what we get.

The Netherlands: No privacy, no competence and instead of capable beatcops we get highway robbery in the form of a cop with a lasergun having his daylong break sitting behind a bush next to our highways. And they wonder why the populace is starting to hate law enforcement.

Do yourself a favor and do a search on Google for "C2000", another one of the Dutch police success stories.

I could weep. Or well....puke really.

Re:Wish i was surprised...

[MrMr]

Somehow I think things could get worse:
Imagine the same attitude and objectives, but now with competent staff...

Re:Wish i was surprised...

[Veneratio]

Somehow I think things could get worse:

Imagine the same attitude and objectives, but now with competent staff...

You mean Britain?

Anything can be deleted

[Hognoxious]

You can delete anything with a sufficiently large hammer or a can of kerosene.

Re:Anything can be deleted

[will_die]

Sigh kids theses days and thier old fashion ways.
Get modern; use thermite or go home.

Will it blend?

[MPAB]

That is the question.

Call Tom Dickson.

What's the dutch for...

[ctrl-alt-canc]

rm -fR /

Re:What's the dutch for...

[isama]

del *.*

they shold've just used

[Anonymous Coward]

msft products, they consistently delete data automatically for you with no interaction required

Re:they shold've just used

[BitZtream]

Really? Have you actually used an MS product? I've been using them and in IT for 20 years and never had data deleted, don't know anyone who has. I've seen a few apps crash and some work lost, but I've had that happen on every OS I've dealt with as well.

Either way, it most certainly would require some sort of interaction, but I'm guessing they haven't got that far in your grade school physics class yet, no action/reaction or cause and effect yet.

If you're going to troll you are going to have to do better than that, we shit trolls better than you out before breakfast here.

The good news is

[obarthelemy]

since they went with an open source solution, they can easily... oh, wait.

Lawyer client privilege

[Kupfernigk]

I don't know if the law is different in the Netherlands, but in the UK if the client tells the lawyer that he did do it, he has to either find a new lawyer or agree to plead guilty and present mitigating circumstances. A lawyer is not allowed to tell actual lies in court.I doubt it is different elsewhere in the EU.

Re:Lawyer client privilege

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know lawyers existed in the UK...the SOLICITOR advises on law and then passes it to a BARRISTER to argue it in court, so it'd be the barrister who'd be lying in court.

Re:Lawyer client privilege

[Hognoxious]

I don't know if the law is different in the Netherlands

Since most of mainland Europe uses the Napoleonic legal system then yes, it is.

A lawyer is not allowed to tell actual lies in court.

Apart from summing up[1], lawyers[2] ask questions which by definition are neither true nor false. It's witnesses who answer them, under oath.

[1] And from what I've seen, they always talk in a strange indirect manner - "we have shown that...", "if foo then you must acquit", "witness X's testimony is unreliable" etc. They never actually say that he did or didn't do it.

[2] Using that as a blanket term, since solicitors can sometimes appear in court now.

Re:Lawyer client privilege

[brillow]

Lawyers in the US cannot lie either, nor can they knowingly prompt clients to lie. They cannot allow clients to testify information they know to be false. There are ways around this however, as only the client and lawyer know about the lie, its easy to hide and I imagine its done all the time. The client can also recant the truth they made to the lawyer and the lawyer can then claim they believed it (though if they end up in front of a bar they will have to be pretty persuasive in why they beleived the 2nd story and not the first.) >What about: I find out the intimate details of what you and your client were talking about on the phone and then use those details to dig deeper and >find evidence I never would have without that phone call? Then I turn up in court, destroy your case, have nothing but hard evidence and you have >no way of knowing that I used your taped conversation to do so (and probably couldn't prove it even if you thought that). Youd have to be pretty persuasive, evidence obtained through illegal means is itself inadmissible. Search a house without a warrant and find a dead body, and you get a murderer that walks free. It would be difficult to find physical evidence in this manner due to chain of custody. If youheard a call explaining that the gun was buried in the woods, and went and found it, a judge would want to know how you knew to look there. If you were pointed to evidence, like bank records etc, that would be easier. However, a prosecutor would be stupid to try this unless it was perfectly air-tight. That kind of misconduct (at least in the US) can give retroactive grounds for appeal for every case they've done, it would unwind much justice. Not to mention your career would be over and you would probably serve some jail time for contempt.

Re:Lawyer client privilege

[Kupfernigk]

Since most of mainland Europe uses the Napoleonic legal system then yes, it is

You must be French, or from Louisiana.

The official definition of the mainstream European legal system is either "Roman Law" or "Romano-Germanic". As the WTO describes it,

Comparative lawyers have identified the following main legal families: Romano-Germanic Law, Common Law, Socialist Law, Hindu Law, Muslim Law, Laws of the Far East, Black Africa and Malagasy Law.

I would remind you that the Netherlands has signed up to the Treaty of Rome, and so has the UK on behalf of both its legal systems, so your "yes it is" is not based on actual knowledge, but an assumption that may be wrong. I was avoiding stating an opinion on something I don't know about for sure. Conclusion - you are not a lawyer.

The cases you are describing are those where the lawyer knows the client is probably guilty. In cases where the lawyer knows that the client is actually guilty, the arguments in court should not happen. (and incidentally, I rather imagine the number of criminal cases handled by solicitors is greater than those handled by barristers. Most crime in the UK is petty crime.)

Re:Lawyer client privilege

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAL, but I believe in the US a defense lawyer who knows his client is guilty would not actually present lies in court, but present enough provable facts to cause "reasonable doubt" in the minds of the jury. Showing that someone else has the motive, means and ability to commit the same crime may be enough for the jury to find the accused innocent.

Another tactic is to discredit the evidence of the prosecution by finding inconsistencies in that evidence. Again, not really lies.

But, I suppose you could call it a lie if the defense lawyer says "my client is not guilty".

Re:Lawyer client privilege

[Anonymous Coward]

in the UK if the client tells the lawyer that he did do it, he has to either find a new lawyer or agree to plead guilty and present mitigating circumstances. A lawyer is not allowed to tell actual lies in court.

That is quite bizarre. A lawyer telling lies is quite different from pleading not guilty.

Not guilty isn't a statement, it is a challenge to prove your case. Otherwise every criminal who pled not guilty would be guilty of perjury when they were eventually convicted.

And if the authorities have minimal evidence against you, you CAN tell your lawyer that you did it. Your lawyer isn't allowed to lie in court, but they are allowed to point out flaws in the prosecutor's case, like the evidence was gathered illegally.

I remember a lawyer's lecture where he said, "I'm sure that 90-95% of my clients are guilty. But I don't know which ones are guilty are which are innocent."

Re:Lawyer client privilege

[Bredero]

Well obviously the law is different since it is a different country. In the Netherlands talks between clients and their lawyers are private (dutch: beroepsgeheim; lit. professional secret). This obligates lawyers to secrecy and they do not have to incriminate their clients even in court. This means that the defendant, their next of kin and his or her lawyer do not have to testify. A similar secrecy obligation applies to healthcare professionals for obvious reasons.

Re:Lawyer client privilege

[moonbender]

It might not be "official", but I think the mainstream European system of law is usually referred to as "civil law".

You appear to have adopted British methods

[Kupfernigk]

..but are just a few years behind. You need to get up to speed on sucking up to the American DHS and spying on your citizens. Could I make you an offer? We will soon have an Administration that is surplus to requirements. Why don't you take it over?

After all, in 1688 we acquired our Government from the Netherlands and it was a big success story. Now it's time to return the favor. Gordon Brown is not quite as glamorous as William of Orange, but I'm sure we'd let you have him and his Cabinet for free.

We also have some bankers you might like. The famous Dutch bankers were the Fuggers. We call ours by a very similar name, sometimes prefixed with "mother".

This is real good news.

[Fengpost]

If the Dutch government can not figure out how to delete the files, how can they expect TPB to delete the torrents!

Delete, Remove, & Drop

[blavallee]

For those who are offering commands to get rid of the data, you need to understand the why they will not work.

This issue is that the storage system used is designed is such a way that you CAN NOT modify any data once it is written to the disk.

Once the data is written, it can not be modified or deleted. Now, the reasoning behind this is so the police can not digitally manipulate the timestamps or data in any way. This is to protect the integrity of the data so it can withstand legal challenges.

They are faced with a 'catch 22' situation. If they can figure out a way to delete a 'prohibited conversation' they could theoretically modify the data too. Opening up the possibility of having a criminal conversation being invalidated.

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[drsmithy]

Once the data is written, it can not be modified or deleted. Now, the reasoning behind this is so the police can not digitally manipulate the timestamps or data in any way. This is to protect the integrity of the data so it can withstand legal challenges.

Deleting and modifying are two distinctly separate things. It shouldn't be a problem for a system to allow deletions but not modifications.

Combined with proper backups and auditing, that should be sufficient to retain the legal value of any digital data.

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[Anonymous Coward]

I would set it up so that when a piece of data is added to the system, it's signed with the investigator's private key and then the file, the signature, and a timestamp are in turn signed by a private key on a central server. With these signatures you can verify in court that a piece of evidence was uploaded by someone with a particular investigator's credentials and that it was uploaded at a particular time (at least, unless someone had access to the central server to modify it, but the central server should presumably be secure).

With a system like that in place, allowing deletion shouldn't allow other modifications to the data. Furthermore, you could design it so that a delete command requires a judges credentials and leaves an audit trail showing the command to delete was signed by a judge.

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[Anonymous Coward]

Very interesting.

So, the only way for the police to abide the law is to stop all wiretapping.

But of course personal freedom is not so easily achieved.

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[Anonymous Coward]

Its fairly straight-forward then:

Every time they want to delete a file, buy a new NetApp and copy all the files they *don't* want to delete across to the new device.

Then destroy the old filer through, uh, conventional methods.. :)

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[JesseMcDonald]

If they can figure out a way to delete a 'prohibited conversation' they could theoretically modify the data too.

Technically there is no need to make the conversations themselves immutable. You just need to be able to verify that the recording you have is the one which was originally recorded. A one-way hash can serve this purpose. For each recording, store the conversation itself in an erasable/mutable medium, but record a hash of the conversation in append-only storage (with multiple distributed backups). If you need to show that the recording is legit, compare it with the hash. If you need to delete something, record the deletion in the append-only medium and then remove it from the mutable storage. The hash will remain, but you can't use the hash to obtain information about the conversation without the original recording.

Bonus: You can recognize unauthorized deletions by comparing the mutable and immutable records.

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[wvmarle]

Just remember that the backups and audits ALSO have to be destroyed. All of them. Especially the backups. And keep an audit maybe of the destruction of that information.

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[LeDopore]

OK, here's an idea that solves the "we can't delete it but we must be able to forget it and we can't forge it" problem.

1. Encrypt the conversations while recording them, each with their own unique AES cypher.
2. Store the encrypted conversations to a WORM drive and keep them forever.
3. Store the AES keys on erasable media.
4. If you want to delete a conversation, you permanently delete the key but leave the encrypted conversation there.
5. If you want to *alter* a conversation, you're out of luck because the only alterable media is the one storing the keys.
6. Even though the encrypted conversation lasts forever on the WORM drive, bringing a conversation back from the dead is as hard as breaking AES without the benefit of any side channel attack - this won't happen any time soon.

Would this work?

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[Anonymous Coward]

Obvious foreward-going answer (doesn't fix already recorded data): if you don't need it, don't record it!

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[JesseMcDonald]

Right. I wasn't addressing the problem of actually destroying all the copies, just the conflict between immutability for audit-trail purposes and the need to delete certain conversations.

For dealing with the copies, a good start would be the suggestion made my another commenter to encrypt the archived copies of the conversations (with unique keys) and hold the keys in a separate database. That way you could back up the conversations themselves by whatever means are most efficient, and to effectively destroy the data you only have to erase the keys. To ensure full destruction you still need to track all the unencrypted copies, of course—and ensure there are no unauthorized copies of unencrypted recordings or conversation keys—for which there is no simple technical solution. That is a matter for policy, procedure, and manual auditing. Fortunately, most of the recordings will never need to be decrypted, so there shouldn't be many unencrypted copies floating around.

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a benefit to making sure that the data simply cannot be deleted. It means that you can require that both lawyers have access to it, to make sure that all the information is available.

Think of police brutality cases where the CCTVs monitoring the area were strangely not working at the time...

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[Lehk228]

untill someone breaks your hash algorithm, then every single record you have is useless

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[JesseMcDonald]

I considered that, but the odds that someone could break the hash algorithm to the point that it becomes useless for qualifying the recordings as genuine does not seem to me to be significantly better than the odds that the records are made useless in some other way, e.g. by electronic or physical destruction, or that the recorded conversation was fabricated in the first place.

Note, also, that the methods devised to generate collisions for existing hashes (MD5, SHA1) require control of "invisible" regions in both files. There are no "invisible" areas in an audio recording, if you do it right—hash the raw samples, and limit the hash to the more significant bits—and anyone attempting to fabricate evidence after the fact would have to generate a collision with the original recording, not one of their choice.

Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop

[wvmarle]

I wouldn't be surprised if just deleting those keys is good enough to destroy the data. After all the data itself is still there, it's just a bit harder to access. You are not talking practical here but legal. That is often a major difference.

And I doubt that deleting a particular key (and all of it's backups and other copies in existence) is much easier than to tackle the data itself.

About destroying not deleting...

[dajak]

The issue is the difference between destroying (in practical terms: erasing), as they are legally obliged to do, and deleting it. This pdf documentlinked from the article explains in laymen's language how the "pointer (or route) in the system to the data concerned" is removed, making 1) the data inaccessible to investigators, and 2) freeing up the space of a hard disk array for new data, and then goes on explaining that the data may theoretically still be retrieved from the disks if not yet overwritten. They don't know whether the commercial black box system they use erases the data, and suspect it doesn't.

No problem?

[Nomen Publicus]

There is this company called "Danger".......

Law required change of supplier

[AlecC]

It seems to me that, now that this is certain knowledge, the police cannot legally continue to outsource their tapping to this supplier. Surely there are required to find another, compliant, way of doing their intercepts with emergency status. Otherwise, they themselves are committing a crime. They could reasonably plead ignorance up to a certain point, but they cannot do so now.

Dutch justice...

[AlXtreme]

Over the past few years quite a few criminal cases were lost exactly because of this problem. In Amsterdam a huge case against Hell's Angels went south in 2007 (everyone was set free) because they didn't destroy tapped recordings with attorneys. Last year it happened again (dutch links, sorry).

I hope someone got canned because of this, but given our incompetent justice department I really can't see that happening. Phone tapping has reached epidemic proportions over here (highest number of taps per person in the western world), as it's much easier than actually investigating a case based on given evidence.

Funny that this is the second article on our incapable justice system within a day on /., go us \o/

Re:Dutch justice...

[BitZtream]

When people get off on a crime because of a technicality, a legal oversight, then your laws are broken. In turn that comes down to voting for, or electing politicians who vote for bad laws.

The voters should be canned for continuing to vote in cheating politicians and voting for laws with loopholes like this.

Re:Dutch justice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me a simple case of the wrong technical solution that does not meet all the requirements.

Us Dutchies need to stop bitching and go and fix the KLPD phone tap system to meet the requirements. In this case: don't use the write-once feature of a NetApps storage array to ensure data entegrity, but use data finger printing techniques as described above by JesseMcDonald or other techniques instead. Which probably means switching software vendors.

NetApp trade secrets? I think NetApp is simply trying to avoid being involved in this, and with good reasons. They just supply the array, not the phone tap software that integrates with it.

This sounds like SnapLock

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, when you buy a tamper-proof data retention system - don't be surprised if it does exactly that! :)

Conspiracy theory

[chrb]

It's a well-known conspiracy theory: that Mossad has created Telco front companies throughout the world to spy on other nations. See The Israeli Spy Ring, which talks about the Fox News articles, and another typical story. Of course, a conspiracy theory doesn't make it true...

Re:Conspiracy theory

[ext42fs]

They would be stupid to not take advantage of any such scheme. Just like any other government organization which has "secret" spelled over its name. And they've been accused of a lot of things but stupidity... Fact is there's a lot of software involved in the wiretapping. And it''s from Israeli firms. We don't have the source and we don't know how it works (I live in NL). Go figure.

Re:Conspiracy theory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a well-known conspiracy theory: that Mossad has created Telco front companies throughout the world to spy on other nations

Along the same lines, there was (maybe still is) a well-regarded firewall appliance of Israeli origin which was supposed to be supplied with a Mossad-friendly back door.

Way to go!

[Anonymous Coward]

So can the western world stop mocking privacy in China now?

Re:Way to go!

[Anonymous Coward]

as soon as there's privacy in china, then yes, we can.

I have designed systems just like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Once the data is written, it can not be modified or deleted. Now, the reasoning behind this is so the police can not digitally manipulate the timestamps or data in any way. This is to protect the integrity of the data so it can withstand legal challenges.

The way (the only way) to remove protected data from this class of enterprise storage system is to copy off all data except the data you need to delete/destroy, bring the vendor in to do what is essentially a low-level reformat of the entire enterprise storage system and then copy back the subset of data that was saved. Is it expensive? yes. Is it time-consuming? Double yes. Is it a major PITA? Triple yes, because of all the paperwork and manual effort you have to do to retain the chain of custody for the evidence data that you're taking through this process. DOES IT ACHIEVE THE LEGALLY-REQUIRED RESULT? YES.

Deleting and modifying are two distinctly separate things. It shouldn't be a problem for a system to allow deletions but not modifications.

Combined with proper backups and auditing, that should be sufficient to retain the legal value of any digital data.

Tell that to O.J.'s lawyers and anybody else who wants to claim, or actually believes, that the police might want to tamper with evidence to frame them. Or tell that to all the commentators on fark who are certain that the police would delete evidence to help protect one of their own. You should understand that these kind of enterprise storage systems that protect data from any kind of tampering (and "losing" data is a kind of tampering) even by system administrators are intended to be used in lieu of mountains of WORM media. When you've properly designed for their use they offer a worthwhile benefit.

It's hard to be sure because I don't read dutch, but it may be that the designers of this Dutch system botched it. The system should have had the Verint recording software tag recordings with a limited duration retention flag at the time the recording is made and then required human intervention to mark for longer retention any specific recordings that can and should be held on to. That partially re-opens the window for "losing" data, but that is necessary to allow legally-required data to be deleted.

Now if you want to tie the whole discussion back to rights in the U.S. ... how many police departments do you think actually have the technological ability to "purge" juvenile records? (hint: not that many) Of those which do, how many do you think actually know how to use that ability?

Re:I have designed systems just like this

[drsmithy]

Tell that to O.J.'s lawyers and anybody else who wants to claim, or actually believes, that the police might want to tamper with evidence to frame them. Or tell that to all the commentators on fark who are certain that the police would delete evidence to help protect one of their own. You should understand that these kind of enterprise storage systems that protect data from any kind of tampering (and "losing" data is a kind of tampering) even by system administrators are intended to be used in lieu of mountains of WORM media. When you've properly designed for their use they offer a worthwhile benefit.

I'm well aware of how the systems work. My first point was that "modification" and "deletion" are different operations, and allowing one by disallowing the other should be a minor technical issue. My second point was that with proper backups and auditing, it should be possible to implement deletion functionality without any need to compromise the trust of the system.

Re:I have designed systems just like this

[arcade]

No, deletion is modification.
==
Phonecall 1: Hi John, you remember that tomorrow is the day we'll gather? At 9pm? You'll be there? Cool.

Phonecall 2: Hi Mark, remember the roleplaying session tomorrow? At 9pm? You'll be there?

[Two days later]

Phonecall 3: Yeah, hi Dianne. Yeah, too bad you couldn't make it. The group has finalized the plans on how to kill the president. We'll go ahead next week, same time. You have to be there!
==

Now delete phonecall 2 from the records. .. would that be .. uhm .. tampering with evidence? ;P

What then do you call Law Society members?

[Kupfernigk]

Members of the Law Society are lawyers. I have both branches of the profession in my family, and I think I know the difference. At the level of criminals stupid enough to tell someone they did it, the solicitor will typically be representing them in court as well. At higher levels, the solicitor cannot be told by the client the he did it and withhold this information from the barrister.

However, your post is utterly uninformed. Solicitors advise clients on law in lower courts. In higher courts barristers will more usually do the work. Commercial clients who don't like solicitor's advice will frequently try to get advice from a QC - a senior barrister - in the hope it will persuade their boss to go on with the case, hence my father's oft-repeated comment to clients "You can have counsel's opinion and it'll cost you £30000, or you can slip me £15000 and I'll tell you that it's 50-50 for half as much."

Dutch secret service tapping journalists...

[BlackCreek]

Illegal tapping of newspapers in the NL:

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/07/09/nisnews-nl-dutch-newspaper-suing-state-for-phone-tapping-journalists/

http://badnewsfromthenetherlands.blogspot.com/2009/10/court-intelligence-service-illegally.html

The Amsterdam court has determined that the General Intelligence Service AIVD broke the law of freedom of press by tapping the phones of journalists of the Telegraaf daily

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, the Netherlands have their phone service going through a Mossad front company, Verint. How very fucked up.

Vendor lock-in

[Jerry Smith]

That's all: it's a black box situation, the police have no control over the data, maintenance is done purely by the manufacturer and tampering will be punished. Somehow somewhen in the past (at least for a decade) the decision was made to purchase (probably read "lease") this Israelian device. And de peaple pay dearly.

Re:Vendor lock-in

[BitZtream]

That is indeed the actual point in this case.

The system is designed intentionally to write data once and NEVER allow it to be modified, so it can not be corrupted or tainted after submitted into evidence. So BOTH sides of the case could know for sure that the data is the same from when it was checked into evidence till the end of time.

So yes, they can't do anything about it, and that is EXACTLY how they requested that it work in the first place.

Re:Vendor lock-in

[Jerry Smith]

That is indeed the actual point in this case.

The system is designed intentionally to write data once and NEVER allow it to be modified, so it can not be corrupted or tainted after submitted into evidence. So BOTH sides of the case could know for sure that the data is the same from when it was checked into evidence till the end of time.

So yes, they can't do anything about it, and that is EXACTLY how they requested that it work in the first place.

You mean: only to be modified/copied by the manufacturer, without the customer ever knowing if and what happened? Yes they requested it, but that doesn't make it Good, Practical or even Legal.

We're not discussing the specs of the system, we're discussing the sanity of the buyers.

Easy solution

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Move tapes to Soviet Russia
2) Tapes delete you
3) ????
4) Profit!

How dumb can you be?

[X10]

The actual problem is that they don't know how to delete calls that they shouldn't have recorded in the first place: conversations between lawyers and their clients. Why am I not surprised? Someone told me a couple of years ago that Dutch police staff is not allowed to be present when staff of the Israeli vendor of the equipment is performing maintenance. I'm sure Moss^H^H^H^H Verint has put in components that send the calls to more recipients than it should.

isn't there a law

[brillow]

Isn't there a law which would prevent an entity from blocking another entity from complying with the law? For instance, if I sign a contract with you that requires me to break the law to fulfill it, the contract is invalid and you can't hold me to it. How does this work in the case of one entity withholding information which compels others to break the law? I'd not heard of this Dutch wiretapping of lawyers stuff, but its ironic that a society which many naive American liberals (of which I am one) view as more-enlightened than the use would so quickly slide down the slope of injustice. Privilege is one of the pillars of society.

Re:isn't there a law

[RoboRay]

There probably is one, but it's irrelevant. An Israeli company isn't subject to Dutch law, which is the law that would be relevant here.

Lesson of the day? Buy local, folks!

What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just have them store their data on Seagate 1TB drives! Everything will be gone in 3-6 months.

WORM drive

[midicase]

When I worked at fortune 500 company we had these Write Once Ream Many dive systems to record images of contracts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_Once_Read_Many

The drive platters looked like CD recordable media in a plastic case about the size of a large pizza. Two machines would write out the data and when full the platters went into one of the jukeboxes (readers). Not a bad system, a bit slow. 90's tech.

Re:WORM drive

[alexo]

When I worked at fortune 500 company we had these Write Once Ream Many [sic] dive systems to record images of contracts.

What company was that? Goatse?

We knew at some point

[Errtu76]

But then we got high.

rm -rf

[nimbius]

*.wav or *.aiff usually...

references available upon request. hourly, not salary offer please.

The irony here is...

[stakovahflow]

I am not sure if someone already pointed this out, but the irony here is that most companies, governments, etc, have a hard time holding onto data. Normally, one does not read/hear about a company/government that cannot "delete" data... Good times! --StakOvahflow

Re:The irony here is...

[John Hasler]

I think most organizations would run into similar problems if ordered to prove that they had destroyed all copies of some specific data. This is much harder than rendering it inaccessible by normal methods.

No privacy but No Idea how to USE Tapped Calls?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Netherlands are famous for the highest level worldwide of tapped calls: basically everyone is tapped. Privacy of human beings is constantly and relentlessly violated by saving all people's data, child growth records, police records, medical records, all highways you ever drove through, all metro or bus you ever took, any website you ever visited through your mobile, sms you sent, call you made and so forth, all goes into huge databases often officially in the hands (or easily accessible from) government agencies, and quite often very badly managed(read: badly protected) through external outsourcing contracts. That's the impression you get.

Let alone having a clue about their own IT system. Everyone is tapped, we said. Unsurprisingly: nobody cares, because despite overly unnecessary tapping, the country stays as yet infested by criminals and criminality, also due to the fight between judiciary and political worlds.

It's a cultural aspect I think: so much logged, nobody knows how to use that in first instance to successfully defeat criminality in courts, so that bad guys manage to walk free. But I guess a lot of people has fun in their gray office in rainy days at listening the recording of your call with your girlfriend..

That said, if you are lucky your living standard may be pretty good in the land. You can sue your neighbor for damage by his cat and win his money.
Only: if there is a bad example of paranoid violation of privacy combined with apparently inadequate enforcement of the criminal law, there you have it.

Any world you say may be used against you, if we find the record.. wait a minute.. just a sec.. almost there...... ... oh but we didn't have the right to keep records of you so we deleted it...... ..... actually, we have no idea how to delete a record and all its snapshots normally, but in this exceptional case we managed to.. a system crash.. I'm not sure.. ....... .........there seems to be a problem with the support contract of this thing... they manage it from India...
Ahem, sorry It's friday 17:30 can you come back on Tuesday? .. otherwise send a letter to............

Dear Netherlands: How To Delete Tapped Calls

[Anonymous Coward]

get a very large MAGNET !

By reading this solution, you obligate the Netherlands to pay the sum of Euro 100,000,000 into Acct #3443321

Nigeria National Savings Bank, Lagos, Nigeria.

Yours In Crime,
K Trout

Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked with Verint many many times I can tell you that they will nothing but stonewall you and then charge out the ass (7+ figures) for the simplest of procedures. Verint and Nice are the worst recording companies there are.

colour structure and density of pubescent children

[Anonymous Coward]

Colour, check.
Structure, uhm, what?
Density?

Better way:

[GameboyRMH]

I prefer:

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hda

Makes data recovery much more difficult :)

Drag the .wav files to . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

the little trash can thingie in the corner of the screen. See, that was easy.

Personal data sent to a non-EU country?

[John Hasler]

Doesn't that violate EU "data privacy" laws?

Re:Personal data sent to a non-EU country?

[deckardt]

The data is not sent to a non-EU country, the builders of the system (placed in the Netherlands) are Israëli.

Its time for...

[deckardt]

a cryptophone. Sure, the call will be logged, but it'll be encrypted, care for some speech to text on noise?