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U.S. Pressures ISPs on Data Retention 221

Posted by Zonk from the because-they-needed-more-to-do dept.
packetmon writes "According to Wired's Declan McCullagh 'In a private meeting with industry representatives, Gonzales, Mueller and other senior members of the Justice Department said Internet service providers should retain subscriber information and network data for two years ... A more extensive mandate would require companies to keep track of e-mail messages sent, Web pages visited and perhaps even instant-messaging correspondents.'"
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U.S. Pressures ISPs on Data Retention More

U.S. Pressures ISPs on Data Retention

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  • wow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joe 155 ( 937621 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @06:45AM (#15415221) Journal
    that's a lot of data... I wonder how many hard drives it would take to keep that much. besides, it would be so much data that it would be really had to sort through it all in order to try and prevent any crimes (I'm assuming this is an anti-terrorist thing - as most crazy freedom reducing laws these days are)... all this would do is after someone had blown themselves up and you knew who they were you could say "so in this instance "flower" meant bomb... but because of the cellular nature of these groups we're no closer to stopping any other attack"

    • Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jacksonj04 ( 800021 )
      If yuo run a mid-sized network just get your router/firewall to log everything that goes past to gat an actual idea of how much this is. I tried it a while back on my home network (3 users, slightly above average on each) and got some stupidly large volume of data.

      • Preserving ALL of your data IS possible (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27, 2006 @10:32AM (#15415783)
        I've worked at one startup which actually WILL preserve all of your data. You are misleading people by thinking that there's just too much data to capture. It just isn't so. Furthermore, the technology is here right now to report, in real time, what you are doing.

        If you don't believe me, just look at the technical specs of the device which AT&T is using for the NSA. Also look at packetmotion.com. And, from looking at the job openings at dice.com, there's at least another startup on it's way to do the same thing in this market.

        Right now, they can't keep all of your packet data for two years. But they CAN keep all of your connection data, and tell not only what sites you are connecting to, but also what type of connections you have. It's pretty useful for identifying Kazaa (et. al.) types of connections.

        If you don't believe me, just ask the IT staff at UC Berkeley. They actively pursue this type of snooping on both faculty and students. They, and other Universities, are a preferred testing ground, since they throw such a load at the devices.

        Now, why Universities encourage outside spying on the faculty and students is beyond me. But yes, this stuff is happening right now.

        The current goal for all of these companies is to preserve ALL data for at least two years. They aren't there yet, as the disk space required is extensive. But they CAN do it for shorter periods of time, if one spends the money on filers.

        What's more, it will only be a matter of time before they can preserve this data for at least two years, and longer. There are companies which make use of cheap fast SATA storage for about 1/5 the cost of a NetApp filer. 50 Terabytes is affordable; in 5 years, you're looking at affordable Petabyte storage.

        The point here is that the Government is ahead of the curve, as they know it's only a matter of time before the disk storage required to keep all data is afforable. So they want this snooping in there now, as it will be a lot easiler to mandate that ISP's keep ALL data once they have these hooks in place.

        So please quit misleading people into thinking that there's too much data. Snooping, reporting and storing this stuff is possible now, and is only going to get easier and cheaper in the near future.

      • Indeed it would be quite unreasonable to simply log all packets. What you'd want to do (and many ISPs do) is keep a log of "flows." In other words, each connection, its source and destination, number of packets sent, etc. That is much more reasonable. Although I don't know how useful it is for anything other than gathering statistics on network usage.

        -matthew

    • Re:wow (Score:3, Informative)

      by jcupitt65 ( 68879 )
      The UK (and now the EU, thanks T. Blair!) have data retention already in law (though not yet implemented AFAIK).

      They don't retain the data: the volume would be far too high (as you say). They just (!!) track who mails who, who IMs with whom, and the websites you visit. Just liike an itemised phone bill, but covering the internet. The websites thing is unclear: I don't know if they're planning to just keep www.mybank.com, or whether the whole mybank.com/transaction.php?cardno=234587634958349 8 will be ret

      • Re:wow (Score:2)

        by Björn ( 4836 )
        The UK really stands out as the most pro-surveillance country in the world. There are also plans to monitory the movement of every car and to keep this information available in databases for at least two years. I can only hope this is not exported to the rest of the EU. Here is a short article [independent.co.uk] about it.

        For some reason I keep expecting that sinister music from the Twilight Zone to start playing.

        • Re:wow (Score:3, Informative)

          by TheGavster ( 774657 )
          The thing that scares me about the car logging isn't so much the logging (which is worrisome on its own), but the plan to automatically correlate that data with the movement of cars found to be involved in terrorist incidents after the fact. So if your car was near the terrorist car for 50 miles leading up to the attack, now you're a person of interest, all because you kept to the right and didn't pass.

          • So if your car was near the terrorist car for 50 miles leading up to the attack, now you're a person of interest, all because you kept to the right and didn't pass.

            If you keep to the right and don't pass for 50 miles in the UK, then you certainly are a suspicious person and the police has quite legitimate reason to have a little chat with you ;).

            • I suppose that in this particular case, a system to track and prosecute people who keep to the right would be a positive development. /Ignorant American
        • The US has access to our logs [slashdot.org]. I wonder if we'll get access to theirs?
      • Do you know what kind of software they are using to extract IM source/destinations? I guess they can use their own SMTP logs to keep track of mail (assming the "terrorist" uses the ISPs mail servers), but it would be a lot of work to extract meaningful data out of any given TCP/UDP flow at the appplication layer.

        -matthew
    • "(I'm assuming this is an anti-terrorist thing - as most crazy freedom reducing laws these days are)"

      Honestly, how many terrorists are they going to catch? How many have they caught so far? How long do you think it will take them to find other uses for your information?

      If you think it's ok for them to do this to 300,000,000 + Americans just to catch 5 or 6 terrorists, you deserve everything you get.

      It's not an anti-terrorist thing. It's an anti-American thing.

      Never forget that.
      • Well, the problem with numbers is that the Gubornment will continue to say things like "We have stopped $_x terrorist attacks since we began $_y survielance program. We cannot elaborate on the specific incidents, in the interest of national security. But trust us, it is true, and we are winning thanks to our citizense."

        My grandmother is a naturalized American citizen. I talked to her for several hours a few weeks ago. I was amazed to hear her say that she does not care if the Gooberment listens in on he

    • Re:wow (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Cicero382 ( 913621 )
      Well, I can't speak for "them", but our firewall saves *every* packet that passes through it for security reasons (don't ask - it's a client thing). It's mirrored, but I dug my heels in when they wanted backups.. Why?

      We ran a trial period to look at the issues (who wouldn't?) What we found was this:
      (Hops over to firewall to get the stats..)

      Over the 4 week trial period we captured 521Gb of data. Since we had only allocated 500Gb for the whole thing - this was worrying.

      BTW - we use a full-duplex satellite

    • Hard Drives? Bah! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @10:03AM (#15415693) Homepage Journal
      If they want that data, each packet should be printed out and mailed to them!
    • I'm assuming this is an anti-terrorist thing

      No, it's a child porn thing. RTFA. But these excuses are interchangeable; they'll be using it to track down everyone from Mafioso to school truants.

    • The good ol democrat^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H republican^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Government manifesto.

      If the ISPs can't afford the disc space, then we'll provide it for them for free!

      Then we can even spin it on them -

      "We'll give you FREE hard drives if you'll just do us ONE little favor and record the data of all your customers. Simple stuff, email, transfer data, what percent was encrypted, destination IPs, peak activity times... 2 years later: Also if you want to keep those hard drives coming, we want chat logs, email

  • Why not just follow the formula in 1984? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @06:50AM (#15415233)
    Rather than put all of the onus on spying on the population on third parties, such as telcos, credit card companies, ISPs and airlines, why not just implement the solution in 1984. You just install two-way TVs in everyone's homes and offices. That way you can efficiently monitor what everyone is doing in a centralised fashion. The data would be recorded for later playback if needed. As a safeguard, officials would only be able to examine the recordings if they obtained a court order (unless, of course, the President decided it was necessary to the fight against terror to waive the requirement for a court order). After all, if you are not doing anything wrong, why object to such a system?

  • Do they realize the scope? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mentatultima ( 926841 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @06:55AM (#15415241)
    Considering that more email is generated every year then snail mail; nevermind that just logs alone can overflow hard drives (happened to quite a few systems I encountered). Not even counting the privacy considerations this will create traffic jams and increased costs for internet usage (The extra hard drive space has to come from somewhere).

    Not to mention that all that extra has to be pored through. The FBI had gotten information on a case from homeland security, unfortunately they did not parse it down and the FBI agents lamented that they spent a majority of time chasing down pizza deliverys instead of spending more time on the actual case.

    Image the uproar when (not if) a cracker gets into the database and abuses all that information.

    The information gathered from users can also be used(abused) for blackmailing.

    You might be asked to testify against someone, if not then well your employer and spouse might accidently find out about your surfing habits.

    All in all, this sounds like a lose-lose situation for almost all involved.

    • Re:Do they realize the scope? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:08AM (#15415262)
      I will just add that one of the most important uses of the information will be to go after those who "put national security at risk" by revealing illegal actions by the security services.
    • Even if they implemented the system, and figured they did have enough space to store it all, couldn't everybody just start sending and receiving garbage 24 hours a day in order to clog the system. Some kind of P2P clog the log system?
    • More email than snail mail..

      what's the basis-- # of pieces of each or amount of data contained within or 3-d mass volume of actual mail?

      if you mean # of pieces.. if (fer analogious example) I had to store 1000 copies of of postal mail, or 100,000 pieces of email per person-- I know which would be simpler to arrange&store... the email.. I think the comparison to postal mail is useless..

  • conflicting goals (Score:5, Insightful)

    by runlevel 5 ( 977409 ) <g@p@patnude.gmail@com> on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:04AM (#15415253)
    FTA

    "I will reach out personally to the CEOs of the leading service providers and to other industry leaders," Gonzales said. "Record retention by Internet service providers consistent with the legitimate privacy rights of Americans is an issue that must be addressed."

    Privacy rights and citizen-snooping mix worse than water and oil.

  • Simple Solution (Score:4, Informative)

    by massivefoot ( 922746 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:13AM (#15415271)
    Is this not exactly the sort of problem public key cryptography is well-suited to combatting?
    • Do you want to explain to me exactly how you encrypt an http GET command? They're talking about tracking what sites you visit - just like China. At least we know they can count on Google for help.
      • Maybe you could use a new technology called HTTPS to ecrypt your HTTP Get command. Sure they could track which server you connect to, but not which pages are requested, nor the data that is sent back. A proxy system that did the requests for you would hide who was getting which pages.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:48AM (#15415326)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • No. They talk about the information. e.g. that I connected to http://politics.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] not the fact that I actually wrote this.

        So you are a politically interested terrorist^Wcitizen, hmss? Slashdot... give us the user id corresponding to IP address w.x.y.z on 12:48 PM EST, CST or WST. Oh, here's the court order. How did we find the IP? Oh... we didn't need to tap anyone for that, ya... see... it's lawfull to snoop on all citizens, ya see?...

      • You're incorrect about what they actually want... The government hasn't made clear what information they want retained. They're not sure if they want entire sessions of just session information. I wonder if the government is going to subsidize monies for companies to build their infrastructures to accomodate the information the government is soliciting. If I were a small business and did not have the money in my budget to fill this task should I be fined?
        • Even if the headers/ip addresses is all that they want, what is stopping some hacker from making a botnet/virus that makes your computers perform 'highly suspicious' tcp/ip traffic on hundreds of thousands of innocent people's computers?

          --jeffk++
      • Compare it to the fact that phone companies keep records of whom you called when. Not what you said on that phonecall.

        That's the story this week. What was the story six months ago?
    • While it may seem to be the solution, how long before companies are pressured to place something on the operating system level, say a keylogger? Wouldn't be the first time the government went this route (Google FBI +Magic Lantern). As a whole I would think too much crypto usage would create a boon in cybercriminals using crypto for malice thereby giving the government justification for passing laws to ban cryptos. Akin to gun laws... Guns don't kill people...

      This two-part article series looks at how crypt

  • Constitutional Amendments? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Threni ( 635302 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:23AM (#15415279)
    Sadly I'm not American, but this seems like the sort of thing that would be pretty early on in the list of rights you guys have - freedom of speech, not incriminate yourselfs in court etc - so is there any possibility that you could have a new amendment - the right to have private communication with people without having to tell - or without the carrier having to tell - the government? It sounds a bit much to me.

    Also, from a technical point of view, why isn't Linux and other Open Source software using encryption by default? If emails are hard to encrypt as a matter of course, perhaps it's time for another system which handles messages strongly encrypted. I've heard about TOR from the EFF, and I remember the short-lived Triangle Boy system - it really sounds like this sort of thing needs to be made up and running sooner rather than later.
    • Happily, I'm not American. = )

      But I do live in the US. From what I can gather, they want to create big nets or maps of people. Who contacts whom. They don't particularly care what people say initially. That comes later if something strikes their fancy. There was a story once where they ID'd some 911 people on a big chart using this info, but they did not keep the info; the military was not allowed. Now the legislation is catching up with the technology...Nevermind that the 911 person was only fingere
    • The US Government had earlier found that simply appealing to the populace to "think of the children" can get the populace to tolerate a great amount of unconstitutional intrusion. The real key to getting the population of the US to allow total government intrusion is simply the word "TERRORISM".
    • Also, from a technical point of view, why isn't Linux and other Open Source software using encryption by default?

      The short answer? Interoperability. If only 1 in 10 of my friends and family can read email from me, do you think I'll bother to use Linux?

  • It's lifted from the TFA but I guess this is supposed to mean 'instant messaging correspondence' (...in addition to logging the correspondents)?

  • log size (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alzoron ( 210577 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:25AM (#15415283) Journal
    Based on logs i've seen of similar information 2 years of logs would easilly be 26 gbs for a single person. That's just a conservitive number for the types that check their email a few times a week and look at the Lost forums every now and then.

    Multiply that by 100s of thousands of users and you're looking at warehouses full of tapes and/or hard drives. That's if you're conservitive.
    • I work at a small WISP. Wireless Internet is secondary to our primary business, so anything to do with the Internet gets put on hold when a primary job comes up. The practical result of that is, we barely have a spare minute to work on the network side of the WISP (the result is also crappy customer service, but that is a different post).

      Should something like this actually happen, it would take not only a large amount of space, but for us, probably a full time person just to manage backing up the logs. For
    • Based on logs i've seen of similar information 2 years of logs would easilly be 26 gbs for a single person.

      26 GB is what I generate on one single evening surfing pr0n^H^H^H^Hwikipedia!
    • Ah, but if you're conservative, you'll love it cuz its conserving all that nice juicy information.

      But if you're conservative, you're against "unfunded mandates", so you'll hate it.

      But if you're republican (which is not now (and rarely was) synonymous with conservatism), you'll love it because it will be a good way to keep your party in power and since you just invested in disk drive manufacturers, its a double win.

    • well... if we want to flood them with data then just keep repeatedly downloading Debian DVDs over bittorrent and deleting them... My ubuntu dapper update downloads so far this past couple of months must be at least 26 Gigs alone... hmmm... I think it's time to rsynch my mirrors again...

  • Data Storage (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LordLucless ( 582312 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:27AM (#15415286)
    I'm sure the ISPs wouldn't mind - as long as the government provides the data storage center and pipe to the same. I just don't want to be the poor sucker that's expected to develop an algorithm to efficiently search the steaming pile of crap that results from that sort of requirement.

  • Private Meeting? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by badlikeacobra ( 903612 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:30AM (#15415290)
    I wonder if they have some privacy issues about the content of their private meetings showing up on the internet?

  • Distraction? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by m1ndrape ( 971736 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:33AM (#15415295) Homepage
    are we sure this story isn't just to distract us from the AT&T + NSA snooping headlines? if they need to ask ISP's to retain all this data, then surely the NSA isn't doing what everything thinks they are doing.

    • Re:Distraction? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rbarreira ( 836272 )
      if they need to ask ISP's to retain all this data, then surely the NSA isn't doing what everything thinks they are doing.

      From what I remember this isn't quite true... The NSA + AT&T case is about real time data mining, not blind storage of details of every connection made by an user. The case presented in this article enables investigators to get data about the past, even if nothing suspicious was detected at that time.

  • Freedom and Cost (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sqreater ( 895148 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:36AM (#15415299)

    The cost of freedom and rights is paid not just on the battlefields of the wars we fight, but in our everyday lives. When we become so weak that we cannot accept that cost, then we cannot have rights and freedoms.

    In Massachusetts, USA, we now have State Police on television, threatening the citizens of the State over seatbelt use. In the mad desire to save the last life, our government and police oppress and threaten not murderers or rapists, not armed robbers or burglars, but citizens commuting to work, mothers doing shopping, and old people on the way to bingo.

    You can be sure that the requirement to hold all ISP information on individuals will extend from 2 years to 5 to 10. Then there will be a lifetime requirement on all communication by an individual.

    They justify these incroachments on rights and freedoms by saying they are fighting crime and saving lives. We have to be strong enough to accept the consequences of our freedom to chose in our lives and tell them we are not mere cells in the body of society. We must tell them that we are not all "uncaught criminals" who must be monitored and spied upon by the government for our own good. We must tell them to go to hell.

    • The parent poster is dead correct. Not being spied on and continually asked "Your papers comrade" was supposed to be one of the touchstones of American citizenship. When I was growing up, I was often told that not enduring such things and NOT TOLERATING them was one of the many things that made us better than the Russians. People used to care enough about that citizenship to even brook contemplating the traitorous ideas Gonzales and the rest of the Bush administration keep coming up with.

      The people in ch

    • It's not over saving lives at all. The seatbelt legislation is to save the insurance companies money. With mandatory insurance laws the insurance companies get to have their cake and eat it too. I have long argued the seatbelt issue as a freedom issue, yet noone cares except maybe a few here on slashdot.

      It's funny that the the commercial threatens you with a fine, not accident statistics proving you are more likely to survive. Maybe there aren't any statistics? Or maybe people think money is worth more tha

      • Re:Freedom and Cost (Score:3, Insightful)

        by cliffski ( 65094 )
        people *do* value money over their own safety, because 99.9% of people dont have a grip on probability. Thats why people play roulette and buy lottery tickets. People never think a car crash will happen to them.
        I wouldnt drem of driving a car without a seatbelt, I simply wouldn't feel safe doing that. For the same reason, I wouldnt ride a motorbike without a crash helmet. Is that a freedom issue too?
        I was part of a 4 car shunt once (i was stationary, some drunken loon went into the car behind me). Without a
        • It's a freedom issue if you cannot legally choose to take that risk. That has nothing to do with whether or not the risk is large or small. It would be similar to a law which outlawed bungee jumping because of the risk of injury or death. Yes, not jumping is certainly a much lower risk endeavor than jumping, but its our right to choose to take those risks or not.

          There's a problem which if we increase public healthcare at any point is going to rear its ugly head. It's already started in the form of the seatb


      • It's not over saving lives at all. The seatbelt legislation is to save the insurance companies money. With mandatory insurance laws the insurance companies get to have their cake and eat it too. I have long argued the seatbelt issue as a freedom issue, yet noone cares except maybe a few here on slashdot.

        That's only part of it.
        If insurance rates/costs was all there was to it, then the all we'd need is to remove liability for damage to people who don't wear seat belts.

        It's also about forcing people to be sa

      • The seatbelt legislation is to save the insurance companies money.

        On what basis can you make such a statement? Surely the insurance companies just pass their costs on to the policy holders. The costs of not wearing seatbelts is much more widespread than just the insurance companies (which is unlikely anyway). It drives up everyone's insurance rates. For children it is surely a case of parental neglect to put them in a car unrestrained. There is also a societal cost associated with carnage on the highways. O
        • One of the best functions of the insurance industry is that they work to reduce their loss rates so that they can offer lower rates to their customers.

          You misspelled "increase profit margins". Seriously, when was the last time an auto insurance company ever passed savings back to their policy holders?
  • ...between ISPs and their users, the users said they would jump ship the moment they thought their ISPs were helping to spy/keep tabs on them. The users also read a statement into the record proposing that the Justice Department, quote, "go fuck themselves", and, further, that the DOJ heads would, quote, "hit the bricks as soon as we have fired their elected masters".

  • we analyzed your e-behavior... (Score:4, Funny)

    by SlashSquatch ( 928150 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @07:49AM (#15415329) Homepage

    ...and we found a probability of > .5 that you have engaged in illegal activity in the past two years.
    How do you plea?

  • ... harddisk and other mass storage companies.

    If nobody listens when we object on privacy grounds, at least object on environmental grounds... how many kw is it going to take to power the systems to record this data?

    Oh well... at least somebody is backing up my data, even if it's not me :)
    (Not that i'm in the US, but i'm sure my government can't be far behind)

  • My Contribution (Score:4, Funny)

    by SQL Error ( 16383 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @08:20AM (#15415392)
    I get 3 million trackback spams a month. They can have those if they want them.

  • Enough (Score:2, Interesting)

    by blank_vlad ( 876519 )
    Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats. -- H.L. Mencken

  • How you can you not think Bush is Evil? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by marcybots ( 473417 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @09:33AM (#15415596)
    This administration is doing everything it can to erode our privacy rights, take away due process and legal protections, increase governmental secrecy and decrease governmental accountability. All this ironically in the name of our saftey and freedom.
            The Bush administration is eroding our privacy rights through warantless wiretapping of American Citizens phone calls, and we dont know if its only international phone calls because there has been no investigation of this, we only have the people who are violating the FISA statue's word on this. FISA was set up for exactly this purpose. Not only that, they have a database of nearly every phonecall made in America, and they are using it to monitor phonecalls made by reporters to find leaks in their own administration without warrants.
    http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=83880 [thenation.com]
          As for our legal protections, this administration wants to be able to detain indefinitely without trial anyone suspected of terrorism, Jose Paddilla is a American born citizen and though he will now be tried as a criminal due to the threat of his case going to the supreme court. This administration wished to detain him indefinitely without trial prior to that threat. That is scary and unprecedented. Were not talking about legal resident aliens, or people who illegal gained entry into the country, this guy was born here as a citizen and under the constitution he deserves a trial, every citizen deserves a trial, thats a fundamental right.
            As for increased government secrecy and decreased accountability we have documents being reclassified under the freedom of information act, and non-compliance for freedom of informaiton act requests. Its not just security related concerns, but corrupt things like whether a power plant is up to code and is likely to have an accident, hand outs to his industrialist buddies. Another nice tidbit hidden from the public for a long time by Bush's rewritting of the Freedom of Information act is a memo from Exxon mobil to the Bush white house demonstrating the influence of oil companies on this administration's global warming policy's. All of this having nothing to do with national security but being withheld from the public just because it protects monied interests or can embarrass elected officials.
    • Troll? unfair mod for an opinion. You might be interested in this story from This American Life: Habeas Schmabeas [wbez.org]. There is an intereseting segment (at about 32.5 minutes ) about Britain's foray into secret offshore prisons in the 1600s as a response to religiously motivated violent terrorism by fundementalists who believed that by destroying the government, Jesus would come back to earth (e.g., Puritans).
    • ... Clinton got a blow job.

      At this point, I was beginning to think that the R's went after him because they were jealous. Well, at least until I heard about the whole Dusty Foggo hookers, poker, and scotch thing. I guess the R's are just dicks.

  • ...to Web 3.0, where your every click and view is tracked by Big Brother "for your own good".
  • These dudes are looking at the wrong end: "wouldn't it be nice if ..." One thing Gonzales and Mueller ought to do is ask their own IT people what their own internal [proxy] logs [would] look like. And how much it costs to run. And how searchable it is.

    And whether they'd like theor own logs posted for all to see!

  • I'm surprised that the US Govt. hasn't already told ISPs to start keeping a record of DNS requests. While easily bypassed, the average Joe Five Pack user would have no idea it could even be happening. DNS records would really make the first pass of a data mining run a ton easier than starting with something like URL requests.
  • The Justice Department must be running out of hard drive space, and want the ISP's to share the cost.
  • I don't care how much pressure the Government puts on me. It's not going to happen. I think what's going on with AT&T and the NSA it's obvious why the Bush regime wants ISPs to do this. I can give them who was on what IP for however long with a subpeona, but that's all they're going to get out of me.

    Not only is it a privacy violation, the amount of money that would be required to store that information for 2 years is staggering. I'm not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or more and violating
  • Just logging IP connections, i.e. a date stamp, the IP address on both ends, the port number, whether or not the packet was blocked, and the firewall rule that finally determined this, on the firewall on my little home LAN of 5 computers, 1 of which acts as a mail and web server, was cranking out roughly 1MB of log every hour at a slow time in the day, i.e. most of my LAN machines were not being used and the traffic was coming from outside.

    I wonder who's going to pay for all this data retention? Oh yeah, it
  • Its worth keeping in mind that the EU has recently passed a similar directive (covering "data retention") that obliges all EU countries to pass laws within 18 months (or 3 years, depending on the country) on data retention by ISPs.

    ISPs will have to keep data for 6 to 24 months. This will exclude URLs visited, but include the name, address, IP adress etc of every user, and also the addreses they send emails to or receive emials from.

    ISPs are currently negotiating with national governments on the exact wordin

  • JAP Project (Score:2, Informative)

    by cyberkid81 ( 977455 )
    While still in its early stages, wouldn't something like the JAP Anonymity project undermind the entire purpose and usability of data retention? http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html [tu-dresden.de]

  • Watch For Follow-Up Laws To Ban Things Like... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BlueStrat ( 756137 ) on Saturday May 27, 2006 @02:05PM (#15416611)
    ..Anonym.OS http://kaos.to/cms/content/view/14/32/ [kaos.to]

    Until then, consider contributing to these kinds of projects, as they soon may be the only things standing between you and governments being able to track and parse every communication you make.

    Does anyone else find it ironic that some of the most "free" countries are some of the former Soviet Unions' 'client' states?

    Cheers!

    Strat

  • Seagate? (Score:2, Funny)

    by mycall ( 802802 )
    I wonder if Seagate is really behind this one

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