Neil Smalley

From computer weekly web page.
I can't believe this would get thru the commons but judging by the way things are going it's not impossible.

UK companies face the prospect of all telephone, email and internet traffic being recorded and stored for seven years, under proposals contained in a confidential document from law enforcement agencies.

The document, seen by Computer Weekly, was submitted to the Home Office on 21 August, calls for all communications data passing through the network of communications service providers (mainly telcos) and ISPs to be stored for realtime access for one year and archived for a further six years. The Association of Chief Police Officers warned the Home Secretary to write to the managing directors of UK telcos advising them "of the need to retain data ann not to delet it in the meantime".

The document reveals that police chiefs initially asked for data to be retained for five years, but that the Criminal Cases Review Commission wants a longer period in order to facilitate reopening disputed court cases.

The ACPO report acknowledges that computers and mobile phones are changing the nature of evidence. "We now see records of events which were formerly the domain of eyewitness account (because someone wrote the record down) in the hands of machines."

The report rules out individual "freeze and store" orders as uneconomic.

The report considers two options for a national data storage facility: one run by the government, which raises concerns over civil liberties, or one run by contractors under a PFI scheme - which will raise the concern due to Whitehall's poor record of managing such contracts.

robski

saw something about this. It is unbelievable isnt it, but where are they going to store it all?
I mean voice calls are not small in size when digitally recorded.
Just think about the amount of data that is passed about via email!

I have heard tho, that it would seem to go against the human rights act that labour supported, so maybe it wont get through.

Lets face it of Phoney Tony likes it, it will happen. I mean this is the man who uses a special rule to allow critical stuff to bypass the house of lords to allow gay sex at 16. Yes Tony, very critical.

robski

Chris L

This sounds similar to the 'bit tax' they tried to introduce across Europe a few years back. The idea was that the EC would put a tax on every piece of information passed across networks in Europe. Then someone pointed out how would they be able to record and store the vast amounts of information. I agree with Robski, the amount of storage required would be staggering and a I doubt many ISPs would have access to this. Either they would have to put their prices up or they would go out of business.

This appears to be another wonderfully well thought out piece of IT legislation. Right up there with the RIP act and the reform of IR35. They really haven't got a clue have they?

Chris

BarryK

Ha, ha, ha. What a load of old pony.

It's an attempt to make the non IT amongst ye think they really could do this. Don't make me laugh, they can't even computerize government and local government info never mind all this because

a) There physically isn't the storage space
b) there isn't the will power (there's no profit in it)
and
c) who's gonna check it all?

This is preposyerous nonsense, sombody even told me the other day that "soon it'll all be stored on a satellite or something".

Tchar, and monkeys fly out of my butt!

AWD

Don't forget the virtual reality stuff from 'Disclosure'.... they'll all be watching us usng VR soon...

Panic... run to the hills... stockpile fuel....

robski

BarryK,

since when has "it being difficult" meant anything to this government!?

Of course it is possible, its just a matter of saying it has to happen or else. ISPs would have to keep permanent copies of all your emails, ok so they need more disk space, so they charge you more subscription.
The difficult bit would be the voice stuff.
It uses masses of space, that would mean that the mobile cos would have to start storing massive amounts of data, so I could see call costs going up.

Nothing they have proposed isnt available commercially now, its just on a much larger scale.

robski

AWD

Don't the FBI do this in the US currently?

AWD

... and that is obviously far more expensive than doing it in the UK.

DavidRB

No money in it???? Just think of the size of the contract awarded to the company that comes up with the best voice compression storage system. Voices don't have to be stored at CD quality to be understandable.

Checking will be done by automated voice-recognition systems.

A lot of laws are being drawn up by people who are afraid of technology. They are all linked by presuming that people are guilty until proven innocent, something that goes against the democratic foundations of this country. A bit like the EC.

Remember, problems such as "it's too slow" and "it needs to much storage space" are simply engineering issues. Given the will (which definitely does exist), money and some bright people, all such problems can be solved. Then, all that you're left with is the decision on what to do with all the data.....

Stuart H

I think the FBI have a system called Carnivore which is supposed to read and analyse the content of all e-mail communication in and out of the US.

I wouldn't pay too much notice of these 'leaks'. Most of the stuff which leaks out of the corridors of government is fabricated by the press in order to sell a few more papers.

There is talk of a similar system to Carnivore which was announced months ago, but even I (being a complete computer doofus) know that this sort of thing is not possible.

[This message has been edited by Stuart H (edited 05 December 2000).]

robski

The main problem I would think they wold have is that its impossible for them to prove they havent tampered with the source.

Example, they take one of you emails, and reword it slightly. Its 100% undetectable.

How could this be used as evidence!?

On the other hand they could just fabricate whatever they wanted!

DavidRB, agreed re the voice stuff. I would be intersted in what range is actually transmitted by mobiles, and what the sampling rate is. Even so, its easy to compress down to a stil legible, but much reduced size. Take MP3, about 90% compressed from CD, but does loose some definition (primarily at high freqs tho, which wouldnt be required for normal speech)

robski

boomer

... all that the government need to do do is force the CSPs to do the logging for them (copies of e-mails, web-sites visited, mobile phone usage - both calls made/received and the cell that you were in at the time etc.). I doubt whether actually recording all phone calls would be realistic - far too much data, but call profiles are easy.

As for practicalities, well delegation (er, forced legislation) to CSPs means zero direct cost (but yet another stealth tax). Forced legislation - well look at RIP, air-traffic control, European armies, legal gay sex in schools (although not with teachers) - heck why bother with the House of Lords, they will ban elections next!!!

Of course collected data is succeptible to "tampering" (but so is VASCAR!) - and the government can blame the CSPs for any problems (and fine then for even more revenue!).

See The Register today at

Mick

iTrader: (1)

Tony and other high profile politicians have too much desire to be in the ruling elite of Europe not just a little Euro-state like the UK. It's like all this desire companies have to merge and aquire to get bigger all the time. The guys at the top get bigger bonuses due to being bosses of bigger companies whilst jobs are lost art the bottom. My own company merged (as equals ) My team of 9 has now been depleted to 4. 2 of those guys were married in the last year and had just bought their first houses.

Read 'Small is Beautiful' by Schumacher (No not Michael ) and learn about including people in business (and politics )

Mick

GranTurismo

You need to look at the RIP Bill,

Regulation Investigatory Powers or the Such

This says that company such as ISP have to make available the data stored on tier networks if requested. The big problem with his is that some of the data can be encrypted by the users quite legitimately and the ISP is liable to provide the unencryption keys. This is unworkable because the volume of encrypted traffic (i.e a credit card transaction) is huge, also the use of PGP using public key cryptography where the ISP will have no capability to intercept the key because that totally undermines the concept of how this works.

The same applies to your employer , if you send an emails they have to keep it.

Now the Cold war has ended its strange that GCHQ is moving to a bigger site ????

Wot they up to now.

johnfelstead

Not a lot of people know this but EVERY single telephone conversation between mainland UK and northern ireland was intercepted by government agencies during the late 80's/90's.

There was a building on the cheshire plain that sat bang in the middle of the microwave link between the UK and NI that decoded every call, scanned it with sophisicated voice recognition systems and then recorded any matches to known voiceprints or specified word groupings.

This became public knowledge last year when the building was demolished (because they now have more sophisticated equipment!!) and the agency didnt do a very good job of decomisioning the building.

Big brother can and IS watching you!!

Billbill

You Brits are usually way ahead of us when it comes to Govt. snooping.
I think it's a neck and neck thing now.
The only thing we still have is our guns.
You, Canada, Mexico and Austrailia have lost all your means of physically defending your selves against a tyranical home power.
They're working on us now. First the handguns, then the long guns.

Now they're after cyber space. Screw 'em!

Chris L

GT

I didn't realise until I did some work there a year or so ago that GCHQ has two massive sites in Cheltenham (use to assume it was one). Always remember my sales guy phoning up and asking them for a map of directions "er..no sir, we don't give out maps.."

Spooky place, and it would appear that governments are getting even more paraniod (fear of what they don't understand).

Chris