Australian Gov't Tries To Force Telcos To Store User Metadata For 2 Years

AlbanX writes The Australian Government has introduced a bill that would require telecommunications carriers and service providers to retain the non-content data of Australian citizens for two years so it can be accessed — without a warrant — by local law enforcement agencies. Despite tabling the draft legislation into parliament, the bill doesn't actually specify the types of data the Government wants retained. The proposal has received a huge amount of criticism from the telco industry, other members of parliament and privacy groups. (The Sydney Morning Herald has some audio of discussion about the law.)

Comments

Crocodile Dundee

[ArcadeMan]

(Australian government looks at U.S.A. data retention laws)

Australian government: You call that data retention laws?

(Australian government pulls out their own data retention laws)

Australian government: THAT'S data retention laws.

Yea no...

[Charliemopps]

I've worked in the industry for almost 20yrs.
It's not possible. Even just storing DHCP data to meet DMCA requests for a very small telco is gigabytes per day. Add their actual traffic to that? The cost of the storage space would make running an ISP totally unprofitable. Even if you did find a way to fund such a thing, how long do you think it would take a group like anonymous to launch on application that just pinged random IP's all day long? It would almost immediately crush the system.

Re:Yea no...

[Charliemopps]

Actual data would not fall under the definition of metadata. It would be actual data. And I believe at the moment, with the current hard drive storage tech available to enterprises and consumers, is impossible. For now.

Stuff like IP address, URLs visited, emails sent and received from (not the entire email, just who you messaged and who messaged you), location data etc. can certainly be stored. Most logs will be in text which is highly compressible (I know from my systems gigs and gigs of logs generated daily compresses often to less than 100MB).

Right. I do it for a living. Compressed, 10gigs per day, just for DHCP logs. At that's just so you can know which customer had which IP at a particular time. I started a project to automate some of that, but the data was so immense it would have required dedicated servers and such parse it all. You have to remember, the IP gets assigned to a piece of equipment that is not at the customers house. It may appear to you that the ips actually on your router, but it's not. The customers router then connects to that through a vast internal network. It's not nearly as simple as your home lan. It's not "Bobby had 192.168.1.102" It's "Device 42:64:AB:65:??:?? had IP 192.168.1.102 and that device was on rack 123254856 and that rack was in cabnet 35489461 and that cabinet was in remote 452268212, on feeder trunk XYZ, which connected to MUX 6542584 and then left on copper card 2456684 on pair 5451815 which was frogged to 65628 which led to Ped 254-agd-5684 and left on drop pair 51547 and that pair was assigned to Bobby."

But you may be thinking "All that stuffs static though!" it's not. It gets changed all the time. There are lightening storms, animals chew wires, equipment dies. In any given small town techs swap out hundreds of pairs, equipment, etc... daily. In the current real world, all you need to keep track of is how things are hooked up and what's bad. "Pair 1234 is bad, don't use it" and "Customer 5245 has this route" done... but if you want to know what IP they had at 12:45:01 on friday the 26th, you also have to know all of that intermediary equipment info to make the link. So now, you don't just need to know their plant records currently, you need to know what they were historically for 2 years! It's orders of magnitude more expensive and complicated than the current system. We're talking like overhauling the entire telco infrastructure. Plant records is one of the most expensive IT costs a telco has. Could we redesign the entire network to work differently and eliminate this problem? Yes... but we're talking about a massive project that would involve throwing out all of our equipment and training and starting over.

Now, cable companies are different. I can't really speak to them. They work more like an old Bus network and the COAX is like a big antenna everyone shares. So, theoretically, I would think that the IP gets assigned directly to your cable modem via mac address. You'd have to ask someone that works for a cable company though. There may be a lot of problems there as well, I wouldn't know.

1984? Yeah right if only.....

[dablow]

No point in singling out Ausies, the majority if not all Western governments are logging this. Makes 1984 look like the bastion of the free world....

Re:Okay, VPN on by default.

[AHuxley]

Yes VPN providers will just exit that encrypted Australian usage in another random country. All that will be collected is hours of usage to one ip range for years :)
Smartphones, tablets would still give up the gps and other data to the mobile network.

Re:That would make a nice background application

[Qzukk]

I figure once the government makes an example out of the first few people to do that, getting 0.1% of the population to join in will be an uphill battle.