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Will Britain Log All Communications For 7 Years? 320

Posted by timothy from the for-the-children- dept.
psychohorsie writes: "The BBC are reporting that the British intelligent services and the police want all of the telephone calls, e-mails and internet traffic in the countr to be logged and kept in storage for [7] years. If this comes to pass, this is a major blow to democracy in my opinion. They may have good intentions with this stuff to begin with ..." Hian Bosu also points to this story in The Observer . The shape of things to come?
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Will Britain Log All Communications For 7 Years? More

Will Britain Log All Communications For 7 Years?

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  • Re:Okay... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Collecting large amounts of data on everybody also means that politicians are subject to this privacy invasion.

    Even if politicians would be exempt from this law, there is no way to know who would be elected in the future.

    If such law is passed, consider what could happen in just a few years: One of these secret agencies who have access to this data wants a larger budget. A politician is against, but meets an "anonymous" person in the street that tells him to change his mind, or the story about him visiting a prostitute would leak to the press.

    No way this politician could prove he is being blackmailed by a government agency, and he would have to vote for a larger budget to avoid his political future being ruined.

    Given how little opposition we see about this proposal, I wonder if such blackmailing is already happening...

  • So, where can I move to? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, Britain is now the world's fastest-growing police state, so I'm looking for somewhere to move to in the next couple of years; New Zealand was looking good for a while, but they've now got the RIP law, Canadian taxes suck, and America is degenerating rapidly, so anyone have any suggestions? Or should we just get together, buy up an island somewhere, and declare independence?
  • Yet another reason to use strong crypto, even for stuff you may not consider "secure" but merely private. I mean what happens if this stored database gets h4x0r3d? Point fingers of blame all you want but your personal info will have already been compromised.

  • Re:disturbing... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Except of course, you can never actually be sure that the three superpowers Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania exist. The only information regarding the political structure of the world if provided by The Party, who manipulate information for their own ends.

    Infact it would seem likely that the three superpowers did not exist. Considering the amount of resources spent keeping citizens in line, the Government of Oceania would be unable to effectively engage in war against one of the other superpowers. What is hinted at is that the entire thing is set up by the Inner Party to make the rest of the population work harder, and in worse conditions.

    A copy of the book can be found:
    http://kulichki-lat.rambler.ru/moshkow/ORWELL/r1 98 4ch1.txt

    Also how can you say it will never happen. It might have already.

    What is even more disturbing is that I seem to remeber that the book was slightly critical of the labour party and socialism. Now we have a labour party in Britain we have TV shows such as 'Big Brother' and 'Room 101' which are trivialising what is a very current and very important issue. For example ...MESSAGE TERMINATED...

  • My condolences (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sorry Brits. The last time your government became a wretched overbearing dictatorship, we left, found some (mostly) available land, and formed the US of A. Unfortunately for you poofters, however, is there isn't any more land available for you to form your own new, free country.

    Should have get while the gettin' was good.

  • IIRC some secret service or other (the ones who used to be MI5) already keep logs of all incoming and outgoing intetnational telephone and fax calls' traffic data and store that data for, I seem to remember, exactly 7 years.

    The voice daya itself is stored for something like a week or something, unless you're the object of some ongoing investigation.

    Of course, as far as civil rights and protection against unwarranted investigation by the police are concerned, the Brits have a special attitude due to the troubles in Northern Ireland.

    I saw a report on this way back, on the BBC sometime.. It was suggested that the US do the same thing with their incoming and outgoing international calls. Constitutionally, those calls aren't American if one of the parties is outside of the US..

  • Re:Yeah and? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And what exactly is this "British national identity" you're so proud of?

    Because anything that's moral and "British" really can't be outlawed by these dangerous free-thinking European types.. espeically them damn "Frenchies"...

    How exactly can Europeans ruin our national identity, apart from frowning on our xenophobia and stopping our hooliganism?

  • London is already under surveillance (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    London is already one of the most under surveillance cities around the globe.
    There are about 50000 cameras all around the city hidden in old lampposts.
    They have 6DOF movement and the operator can move them with a joystick.
    They even have their own air conditioning system inside the little glass bubble so in winter the glass won't fog and block their view.

    Basically the brits are already fucked... Anywhere in the city you can be followed by a camera.

  • It is already happening (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The telcos in the UK have been aware they may be required to do this, and many of them already have such data warehouses.

    What the article does not say very clearly, is that the telcos will only be required to store details about the phone calls, not record the actual conversation. I have worked on such a project, building and maintaining a data warehouse for a UK telco. Initially we were told that it would be used to customer care purposes, but when the system was live we discovered that it was only being used by the police.

    In some other comments I saw some estimates on the number of calls made and the storage required. A fairly accurate rule of thumb is that each account makes about 6 calls per day. Also for each phone call you will need up to 1kB to record all the call details (this is to allow a number of indices to be built in order to be able to search the phone calls - otherwise it is of little use of storing the data. Also you will be surprised at how much information is generated for each phone call). In the UK there are about 100M accounts (yes more than people, but just think of all professionals who have home phone, work phone, mobile etc). This translates to about 360GB per day.

  • For some quite-upsetting material about the USA's becoming a police state (illegal to wear gas masks...) see The Utne Reader (Nov.-Dec. 2K, Page 30). Thanks, guys, for allowing anon posts!


    Where in the USA is it illegal to wear a gas mask? Can you post a link to a story on this or were you just making that up?

  • The mandatory cry for Democracy refuted (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What does the archival of communications has to do with the form of government? Even though pulling a thing like this off means to have a way of listening in on said communications, which is a bad thing. But still, this has nothing to do with democracy. Democracy is just a way how the people of the governing entity is elected.

    And what truly bakes my noodle later on is when I try to imagine the amount of data storage they need. That's one megalomaniacal shitload of storage! Is this even feasible or just some right-wing conservative fanatic's views or right and wrong imposed upon the rest of the population?

  • The document admits the moves are controversial and could clash with the Human Rights Act, which gives people a right to privacy, European Union law and the Data Protection Act, which protects the public against official intrusion into private lives.

    We admit we're doing the wrong thing, and not honoring our citizens, or the acts that we pass..... but its for your own good. Do politicians ever really care?

  • The logging/watching of emails has nothing to do with democracy. Democracy is a form of government where people vote to decide what happens. Snooping by government may be a violation of privacy and a violation of personal rights but in no streach of imagionation is this a violation of democracy.

    Not directly, and not likely at first. However, it practically begs for trouble. Before long, observant citizens will notice that the more you say things that are unpopular with the current government (such as vote for the other parties), the more likely you are to be hauled into court on a bi-weekly basis to face nuisance charges for loitering (paused 1 second too long remembering where you parked), littering (bit of pocket fluff landed on the sidewalk as you fished for change), jay walking (light changed just before you stepped completely onto the sidewalk), and others.

    This is similar to a civil rights situation known in some U.S. cities as 'driving while black'.

    That's the funny thing, most countries have a tremendous number of misdemeanor charges that most citizens infract in small ways on a daily basis without even noticing. I know that in the U.S. there are cases where it is actually impossable to obey all relevant laws, rules, and regulations. In practice, lack of enforcement smooths things over, but it is there and could be enforced (selectively) at any time.

  • Let's imagine global and correct adoption of unbreakable encryption is a guaranteed result of this proposed undertaking. (It most certainly isn't, but I'm just playing "what if" here.)

    Would the combined effect of logging, encryption, and the RIP bill leave us better or worse off than we are now, in terms of privacy?

    I haven't really made up my mind, but I see some arguments for "better": You'd be sure that only the government could read you communications and only by getting your passphrase from you. That way, anyone who had not been forced to give up their passphrase could be sure that their communications had not been read by their government, their ISP, industrial spies, foreign government spies, or script kiddies.

    Of course, this assumes an impossibly strict definition of "correct" and "unbreakable" above.
    --

  • Who says (Score:2)

    by jjr ( 6873 )
    That they are not already doing this. They just want the power to do it in law. The technology already exist to do it. Nothing really stops them from using it.
  • We log all incoming and outgoing email, although we only log headers, not content. We deliver all mail ourselves if we can, dispatching it directly to the MX for the domain, which seems to work out a little faster than letting Demon Internet do it.

    Some ISP's in the UK, particularly FreeServe, force all outgoing port 25 connections to connect to their own mail servers, so you don't have an option to route mail yourselves. Because FreeServe use dynamic IP's, this may well be justified, as a number of sites are particularly unwilling to take mail from any IP which is listed in the ORBS Dialup list, and quite a lot of SPAM gets sent that way.

    Try it for yourself. Telnet to the MX host for a domain, such as punt-1.demon.co.uk, port 25.. i.e.

    $ telnet punt-1.demon.co.uk 25

    If you don't see
    220 punt-10.mail.demon.net Server SMTP (Complaints/bugs to: postmaster@demon.net)
    then your connection has been redirected, and your ISP is probably logging all of your direct transfers too.

    There were moves underfoot to make ISP's log all transfers to and from their customers. I don't beleive Demon Internet implement that at this time, but I'm sure they could, if they wanted to. At the end of the day, who is going to pay for the storage.

    When space gets tight on the mailserver, the logs are the first thing that nuked. We only keep them incase there is a problem and we need to trace back.

  • thats 86,400 DVD's of data a day, 31,536,000 DVDs per year, 220,752,000 for the intended archive period...

    Extrapolating your calculations well into the range of the ridiculous; if the hypothetical DVD archive is kept in CD style jewel cases (15cm x 12cm x 1cm or 180cm^3 or .018 m^3) then the entire archive of 220,752,000 discs would take up 3,973,536 m^3. Assuming about half on the space in the library is given to walkways between the shelves (a guess based on paper libraries), that requires a building with a volume of at least 7,947,027 m^3. Imagine a square building 1.0 km on a side, by 7.9 m high, packed with DVDs.

  • BBC 3.12.00 reporting bigbrother doubleplusungood refs doublethink thoughtcrime rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
  • Actually in 1984, the UK is called Landing Strip One, which is part of Oceania. Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
  • 300Gb/2000users=0.15Gb/person
    0.15Gb/7days=0.02Gb/dayperson

    Now How many Brittish subjects has The Matrix? One hundred thousand? More? Well let's pick one hundred thousand and 7 years.

    Oooooohhhh myyyyyyyyy
    >5,000 Terabytes.

    Now let's pick up your filer. How much does it cost? Let's pick it up for US$100,000. Yeah things will cost lesser in time, but there is also maintenance, replacements and many things more. But let's just now consider that each unit will go this way as experience shows such huge systems getting up to such levels. Soooo...
    We get only on ONE storage not less than 500 million greenies (oh btw I'm not american). That's a Hell of a Space project... Going to Cosmos?
  • ~50 million - damn my speed typing
  • Not exactly. Because whatever bill you may shot out of the Parliament, one should also consider the aspects of technology and resources. And that's the point where, no matter patriotic feel you may have for being Brittain (note the two tt's) a pioneer, the bill will fail in life. And no one in his good mind will try to overcome financial resources for a "ideal" scheme. Overweighting people with a resource a state needs for itself, may turn this same state into an outlaw. How many times overtaxing turned into revolutions and revolts? Or something even bigger? Let us remember the Boston Tea Party...

    Now I'm not taking things just out of the hat. I'm telling facts. And the one fact is that doing such things overcomes every other possible expenses. And besides this does not mean 80% of what you pay now. Add more than a dollar to what you pay BY THE HOUR (local calculations, i don't know you prices in Brittain).

    And on what concerns my spellings... Well you are Britts in our language. It may not be correct in english. But I can't remember all correct spellings among several languages in 5-6 seconds... I know you care for the correctness of your language. But some have been naming you this way for longer than you created english... So I think I also have a right to be "wrong".
  • The Queen is an extremely important part of the British Constitution.
    Britain has **NO** constitution.
    1)For a Bill of Parliament to become Law, it has to be signed by the Queen. This means that in the event of some Adolf Hitler type being elected, the Queen has the capacity to frustrate his ambitions.
    So, the queen can block the democratically-expressed will of the people.
    2
    )The Army, Air Force, Navy, Police Force etc etc all swear loyalty to the Queen, not to an elected official. This is extremely important and stabilising. In the event of instability in the country, an attempted coup or whatever, the Queen can call on the forces to obey her, and not some tyrant. In a day to day sense, it means that the forces can be more impartial. Can you imagine if they sweared loyalty to Ken Livingstone? Yuk.
    So the army does not defend the people and their belongings, but only the queen.
    3)The Queen is the fount of soveriegnty in Britain - all power flows from her and is exercised in her name. This is extremely useful in the light of encroachments from the EU and such bodies, so expect it to be challenged at some point by the Liberals. Of course they will provide arguments involving 'Democracy' and 'Modernity' and such nonsense, but that is just a front. They really want to submerge Britain and the British Identity into a European superstate.
    The british never saw themselves as mere humans; they think they are above all other nations and always flouted their arrogant snobbishness, never backing-off from the concept that they oughta rule the whole world. They can't play by any other rules than theirs, and they keep changing the rules so they always win. For them, a "level" playing field is always tilted to advantage them.

    That's why the britshit are considered little more than troublemakers in Europe.

    An example of the usefulness and stabilising influence of a Monarchy can be found in Spain in 1974(?), when an attempted coup was foiled by the King, who rallied rebel troops and beurocrats who were supposed to be loyal to him, and him alone, not some rabble rousing general.
    A poor analogy. The "macho"/scatholic national character found in latin countries is biased towards such things, which doesn't happen
    You may say "But that would never happen in Britain - we haven't had a revolution since 1688" but have you ever wondered why we have had such a stable governance, while Frenchies and Germans seem to revolt every ten years?
    When was the last revolt in Germany? Were there any?

    The french adapt to changing circumstances. The french are also unencumbered by the fallacies you find in trashy tabloïds (a british specialty) such as the magna-carta. They don't have revolutions by barons who rebel against their kings so they can have more power. Rather, their revolutions have an habit of giving more power to the people (see below)

    For the french, all power flows up from the people and is exercised by the State and the Government in it's name. The french will put most of it's trust in the State, and since no one believe that the State will screw the people, the State is careful about NOT doing that.

    And if it evers does it, the people just have another revolution. At least, one one gets gray hairs thinking about what the State (which is improperly called "the government" in the US and other anglo-saxon countries) will do next.

    And who know what things may be like in one or two hundred years.
    Hopefully more democratic.
    I just wish the Queen would exercise some of her powers now, and thwart some of Blairs more outrageous suggestions.
    Who's that queen, usurping the people's power? Who does she think she is? And you'll see the queen being de-monarchized faster than you can say "beefeater", so she'll flee to seek refuge in Canada, and she will end her days in a Toronto low-income housing (there was actually a theater play with that story, some time ago)...

    --
    Americans are bred for stupidity.

  • That's just Usenet, doofus, and Usenet is a drop in the bucket. A tiny drop in a huge bucket.

    Look at my next post, on the real numbers.

    And, for the record; I don't use a 10Mb hard disk, or a 10MB hard disk. At work, I use multiple 9 Terabyte raw capacity EMC arrays, larger Hitachi arrays, and enough 3590 tape to back a lot of it up for 7 years.

    -
  • I did, it's right there in my message, or you can follow the link from my original post; JANET's linked to there.

    -
  • Traffic doubles as the cost of off-the-shelf technology gets less. For you to be able to apply this you have to assume that the rate of technology advance in the network will outstrip that of data storage.

    And you, in turn, are assuming the capacity of the existing equipment will double. You'll have to replace it to accomplish that, and since you'll need to retrieve data you'll still need the old hardware lying around, so basically you'll be spending the hardware costs over and over.

    At least double or triple my numbers to account for this.

    I think this is unlikely as moving traffic around inherently requires somewhere to store it at the rate that it is being transmitted.

    Yes, but it's stored on hundreds of millions of individual systems, with individual disk drives. You could model that instead of using tape, but then you'd thousands of times as much money.

    Instead of $80US for your 35GB DLT tape, you'd be buying 35GB disk drives.

    Instead of buying a $250,000 tape array to store 11.8TB, you'd be buying 337 35Gb hard drives and enough computers to run them. That's about $176 bucks a pop for the drives, assuming EIDE. Then you need (in order to keep up with the data transfer rates) no more than two per computer, so that's another $300 computer (I pulled that number out of my ass, unlike all the other numbers I'm using, so forgive me if it's off by a bit) for every two drives, so now you're spending $59,000 for the drives, and $51,000 for the PCs.

    So you've saved money, but now you're replacing PCs and hard drives CONSTANTLY, and losing data when you do.

    So you've got to add more PCs, and more drives for redunancy, and pretty soon you've tripled or more this cost. Boom, it just got cheaper to use tape, which is why Sun can still sell those things, even at $250,000 a pop.

    -
  • > how does logging transactions act as a serious blow to democracy?

    Ask Martin Luther King, Jr. The FBI tapped his phones (because of his "subversive" activities) and discovered that he was having affairs. They used this "evidence" in an attempt to blackmail him.

    By definition, a protestor wants his government to alter their course of action. They may protest peacefully and legally, but they are still going against their government. Giving this type of power to the government gives them the ability to disrupt and destroy anyone who opposes them.

    Wether it be opposition to Civil Rights or just an old-fashioned Final Solution, governments have a pretty bad history when it comes to abuse of their power.
  • Logging all phone calls... well the exchanges probably do that anyway (at least the numbers not the actual calls... you'd need shitloads of storage to do that).

    Logging all emails? Huh? Not all email goes via an ISP. You can't make everyone log all their emails themselves - I don't believe this part of the leglislation is practical or indeed possible.
  • These investigations made wide use of unintentionally recorded emails and logs. Pretty much a wash- leaves a lot open to interpretation on both sides.

  • I presume between the NSA monitoring programs, commercial record keeping and marketing research, the equivalent is done in the US. Its just dispersed among a number of organization takes a little more work for someone to aggregate.

  • I'm hoping to get ***FIRST CALL*** in....

  • Nope. It's a constitutional monarchy [odci.gov].

    Effectively a democracy in all but name.


    --Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
  • Britain has **NO** constitution.

    I refer the honourable gentleman to this site [redeemer.on.ca] (which is not based in the UK) for a brief description of the ins and out of the British Constitution. It evens includes examples of written documents that relate to what you would find in the written constitution of other countries.

    I will, however, also post a quote from the site (for those who cannot be bothered to click on the link).

    Great Britain is often said to stand alone in having an unwritten constitution. This assessment is both true and false. It is true to the extent that there is no single document, standing in a position of superiority to ordinary statute law, that claims to embody the entirety of the British constitution. The most essential elements of the British constitution exist by unwritten convention. But this assessment is false in two respects. First, it can be argued that every country has an unwritten constitution which develops around the written document, often changing or even nullifying its provisions. Second, there are indeed written statutes even in Britain which can be seen as possessing a certain constitutional status because their subject matter is constitutional.
  • It's a blow to democracy? Isn't UK a monarchy?

    __________________________________________________ ___

  • That's why there's no light coming through my bedroom window anymore!!!
  • I know not everyone is connected, but those of us who are (especially on DSL/cable)

    DSL... hmmm that's why it's taking BT so long to process my order, they're still waiting for the tape library to arrive at the local telephone exchange :-)
  • Ummm...

    You did read the stuff about archiving it off to tape, didn't you? Hell - I wouldn't keep that stuff on on-line storage for long.

    I wouldn't buy more filers as backup devices...

    Oh - before you ask how you backup data that's constantly changing research the Snap**** technologies that the filer provides.


    *Sigh*

    No one seems to listen, it's possible, very possible.


  • From your own statistics [columbia.edu]

    That is NOT JUST USENET....

    *sigh* no one seems to listen....

    it is possible.... very possible.

  • Can I ask that you put forward daily figures... putting forward figures for 7 years is pretty misleading.

    We got to around 0.1bln UKSterling over seven years... or say 20mln a year...

    £20,000,000 a year

    Hey, perhaps I'm rich, but that doesn't look to me to be a hell of a lot of money... The National Lottery could pay for it, let alone the government.


    *Sigh*

    No one seems to listen.

    It is possible....

    very possible...
  • and again assuming traffic stops doubling every year.

    Traffic doubles as the cost of off-the-shelf technology gets less. For you to be able to apply this you have to assume that the rate of technology advance in the network will outstrip that of data storage.

    I think this is unlikely as moving traffic around inherently requires somewhere to store it at the rate that it is being transmitted.

    If it can cope now for £20mln a year it should be able to cope in seven years for the same amount.


    *sigh*

    no one seems to listen... is it possible.... very possible...
  • oh get a life!

    Are you looking over your shoulder every minute of the day?

    Are you subversive?

    Are you going to blow up the houses of parliament?

    I tick "None of the above" for all those, seriously.
  • Well:

    Firstly: Not Everyone is connected. I would divide your estimate by a quarter.

    Secondly: With regard to downloads etc.. They only have to record the data you pulled off the web once, and then just store pointers to that data for each access across the population.

    Thirdly:

    Voice recognition can record conversations with much higher compression than storing the analogue sound.

    Fourthly, whichever of the above you discount here are the number of tapes needed daily, nationwide:

    16000 Terabytes = 6.26 terabytes a day = 90 DLT tapes a day
    8000 Terabytes = 3.13 terabytes a day = 45 DLT tapes a day
    4000 Terabytes = 1.57 terabytes a day = 23 DLT tapes a day
    2000 Terabytes = 783 gigabytes a day = 12 DLT tapes a day
    1000 Terabytes = 391 gigabytes a day = 6 DLT tapes a day

    These are nationwide figures... Spaced out across multiple telephone exchanges, these are small daily numbers.
  • 255.5 Terabytes... nationwide?

    Do it with a cluster of Netapps an Sun Tape Libraries...

    easy peasy. How many telephone exchanges do you think we have in our green and pleasant land?

    Let me guess: you still use a 10Mb hard disk?

    Sorry.... but look at my specs. I know you're only talking about Usenet, but I think my figures are pretty sound. Break the problem up to individual telephone exchanges and it's quite possible. 27.645 terabits world wide (for a 10billion population of which British would count for 0.6% of (1.6 terabits for Britain) divided by 250 telephone exchanges = 6.4 Gigabits. Hmmm - seems perfectly possible to me.
  • ...just submit form KY-23 and the Ministry of Health and Records will let you know!

    Don't you mean the Ministry of Love (1984 reference for those who Don't Get It)?

    This is a great combination. They log everything. If you encrypt it, they kick down your door and take you to a secret court where you are forced to reveal your private keys. Who wants to bet that the next step is to "license" strong crypto or force key escrow?

    Britain is dangerously close to becoming a police state.
  • Personally, and speaking as a British Subject, I have no problem with these moves. In some other countries, such as Germany or the USA, these moves would be unnacceptable;

    The German's are unlikely to try this, whilst there are still people around, from the Stasi, who can explain why this won't work.
  • If Britain has such a great history of Freedom, then why did my ancestors have to sail across the atlantic 500 years ago looking for freedom?

    500 years ago would have been the explorers, then the armies of people from Spain and Portrugal. The USA came after the Hispanic empire. As for it's founders some were criminals (who were transported) the others were religious extremists (the only ones who could have claimed to be looking for freedom, the freedom to force people to follow their religion.)
  • We the Yanks wrote laws into our Constitution to prevent the excesses of power that your very government seemed to wield over its very Subjects.

    The problem with these safeguards is that they don't actually work. When was the last time a US politican was tried for high treason? This didn't even happen to the notorious senator McCarthy.
  • Ultimately, the gov't will use this to prey on the lazy or less well informed. Why? Because smart crooks (yes they exist) will be making massive use of strong crypto

    If they are smart they won't use "crypto" any different from the norm. To do otherwise would draw attention to their communications.
  • The point of the above page is that everyone should be using encryption - even for casual stuff, as the sudden presence of an occassional encrypted document suggests you're up to something, an example of traffic analysis - if you can't decrypt the messages, watch where the messages are going.

    And similarly should use the same type of encryption for everything. Rather than a "more secure" cypher for more sensitive communications.
  • That's the scariest sentiment that comes out of things like this. That suveyliance is fine because ordinary, law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear, right? That's just the naive reaction these "security" agencies want. It leads to unjust harrasment and imprisonment of law-abiding citizens. "Sir, our logs show you have been sharing DeCSS...you'll have to come with us," which leads to "We show that you've been associating with dissidents, we have some questions we'd like to ask..."

    Also in order to possibly run such a system requires a lot of people. Organised criminals could actually be rubbing their hands in glee. If they can corrupt the right people then not only do they have little to fear but also a useful source of information for their criminal activities. N.B. in this context certain US corporations must be included in the list of potential "criminal organisations".
  • And a written constitution is no guarantee against attacks on privacy without clauses protecting privacy and/or a seperation and definition of powers that would prevent government from doing that.

    A written constitution is no guarantee of anything unless there is actually some method of enforcing what it says. In the case of the US constitution this might be police refusing to arrest anyone under an unconstitutional law or it might be public executions for politicans who attempt to pass laws which violate the constitution.
  • Only rarely do American public educational institutions actually teach non-Marxist civcs anymore. People are ignorant of the Constitution and the Feds take advantage of this, and for this reason, I don't think public education will EVER improve, they don't want it to. Ignorant people who don't know their rights are a lot easier to fool.

    This ignorance appears to cover a large number of US citizens, including those directly involved in law enforcment. How often has a US judge thrown out a case invalid due to the US constitution and jailed the prosecuter for contempt of court?
  • ...and we have always been at war with Eur^H^Hastasia.

    I just wanted to be sure the authorities know I was sick, but I'm better now. Righthought is doubleplushappythought.

  • >The british never saw themselves as mere humans; they think they are above all other nations and always flouted their arrogant snobbishness, never backing-off from the concept that they oughta rule the whole world. They can't play by any other rules than theirs, and they keep changing the rules so they always win. For them, a "level" playing field is always tilted to advantage them.

    As opposed to the americans, who NEVER try to impose their rules..

    btw.. yes, most european monarchs can, in theory, stop laws. to my knowledge, this has happened once in Belgium. the belgian king at the time, Boudewijn, could not in clear conscience sign a bill legalizing abortion (IIRC). he resigned as king for a little while, bill was passed, and he became king again. the other option was to completely get rid of the royal house.

    //rdj
  • A good point --- us Merkins are lazy. Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that if we *do* revolt, we're more dangerous. I mean, if you were a government peacekeeper, would you rather go up against a bunch of truckers or a bunch of survivalist apocalyptic zealots?
  • Factor in Moore's Law and the speed of bureaucracy. This will take a year or two to become a law. By then, the idea of at least logging all requested URLs and the headers of every email may not be unreasonable. Also remember the general belief that intelligence agencies have computing power and new tricks well in excess of what we common slobs may do (although that does seem a bit strange, given the pace of Silicon Valley innovation). Also consider the fact that Echelon apparently works and is useful enough for the UKUSA folks to keep it running.

    It makes me wonder if one could push this through in the US. My thought has always been that one couldn't get sufficiently Big Brother here, mainly because the populace has guns, unlike most of Europe. Were I the government, I'd see an armed populace as something much more likely to start an active and effective revolt, and therefore be more scared of trying to abuse it. On the other hand, the same portion of the populace which owns those guns is the one that thinks the Internet is full of evil hacker pedophile terrorists.

    I'm also wondering if there's anything beyond encryption that will help. On the one hand, there's the possibility of private networking, but this couldn't go over existing wires. Given that most of us can't afford to lay fiber or cable, that means wireless, which in turn means that anyone who cares about snooping can just grab packets from the air.

    Perhaps there'll be a market for personal browsers... people who'll sit at the computer for you and read the subversive stuff that you want to read but can't because of a reputation.
  • This presents a very good opportunity for me to suggest that you read my web page Why You Should Use Encryption [goingware.com].

    I'm sure it's self evident that people with sensitive business data should use encryption - or is it? How many businesspeople do you know who carry out complex business negotiations via email?

    One client wanted me to deliver them the source code to their product via the Internet. I refused to deliver until they got PGP.

    The point of the above page is that everyone should be using encryption - even for casual stuff, as the sudden presence of an occassional encrypted document suggests you're up to something, an example of traffic analysis - if you can't decrypt the messages, watch where the messages are going.

    Even people who really should know better may not keep their computer secure. CIA Director John Deutch was caught browsing porn sites from a home computer that contained classified data. There are numerous well-documented security holes in web browsers by which an rogue website can read documents off your hard disk.

    Let's hope he didn't have any encrypted filesystems mounted when he was gazing at those titties.


    Michael D. Crawford
    GoingWare Inc

  • Available now: an all-in-one entertainment appliance with voice and data messaging built-in! This sleek and elegant screen hangs on the main wall of your residence so you can see it from anywhere in your home.

    All messages are routed through the government's storage facility for, uh, security and convenience. Can't recall what you wrote to that collegue at work or that girl you just met? Not to worry, just submit form KY-23 and the Ministry of Health and Records will let you know!

  • The Home Office [homeoffice.gov.uk] is like an Interior ministry, although it also covers part of what might be in a ministry of Justice. Policing, immigration, prisons, fire services, that kind of stuff.

    The Home Office people would also be responsible for drafting this sort of legislation.

  • Suppose a government defines "seedy activities" as "voting for the opposition." I'd say that's a pretty big blow against both democracy and freedom. And what's the point of living in a democracy (which Soviet Russia TECHNICALLY was) if you have no freedom to associate with people without the government watching your every move?


    -RickHunter
  • It seems to me that this will actually help UK citizens' privacy.

    At first, all their conversations will be logged, so that "Anything [at all] you say can be used against you in a court of law." But, after that, UK engineers (and hackers, of course) will push encryption.

    Uncrackable encryption, like RSA and blowfish. With Ghz processors now mainstream, what better use for them than encrypting your daily messages? The world will see a massive flock to encrypted services (like Jabber+SSL, HTTPS, ssh), and the British "Intelligence" will have no data they can read.

    Not a very "Intelligent" move for the UK if they're actually *trying* to invade privacy, it seems to me.
  • Reuters, Dec 4 2003 - Paris, France
    Unconfirmed reports that England has sunk into the North Sea continue to flood into the Paris EU disaster center. Speculation is rife that the British government's ill-advised attempt to record all Internet traffic, begun in 2001, was too much for the geology of the island nation.

  • Yeah, a few people have mentioned 1984 and said it`ll happen soon. I`m interested to know which aspects of the book arent supposed to have happened yet? About the only thing i can think of is that we dont have obligatory in-you-house cams, although i`m sure the street-cams will soon be hi definition ones capable of being swivelled around and pointed through your windows!
  • "If the cast majority of the populace is against it (and they will be!) "

    This is the most common mistake that i see, again and again, whenever some new law that may/will remove rights is mooted. There is NO evidence that this is the case. People do NOT worry about losing their rights if they can be convinced it will keep them safe from drugs/criminals/dangerous dogs/asylum seekers/new-age travellers/paedophiles/insert perceived-threat-of-the-moment.

    There is no conspiracy. If people didnt want this to happen, it just wouldn`t happen, its a simple as that. Another political party would say `vote for us and it wont happen`, and, if it were considered an important enough issue, people would vote for them instead.

    The fact that no parties have stood up and say as much in this case reflects the fact that there are no votes in it.
  • There's a Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] story submission on this exact topic. I bet it will go to the front page soon. British Government considers interception plans more radical than Carnivore [kuro5hin.org].
    ------------
  • Basically what they are saying is that everyone might be guilty therefore we are going to record every connection made for whatever reason. It's like having a legally mandated tail on every man woman or child in the uk that is on the internet.

    Lets look at what this means:

    Access a web page on drugs? Must be a drugs user. Lets raid his house! We now have prior reason! Looked up a web page on the law?? Must have broken one! Lets find out which one! Does your wife know you access porn sir?

    Still there is a distinction between recording the information and having access to it. Big difference. And knowing that a connection exists isn't the same as knowing what flows down the connection. (I'm presuming they are just recording connection IDs rather than contents, for practical reasons atleast.)

    Still there are ways to circumvent this law. Set up your own proxy server for one, off shore. Make one encrypted connection to that; and that's all you need. The law is unworkable for catching criminals of any intelligence. For prying into the personal lives of ordinary citizens, and possibly trying blackmailing them, its great!

    Paranoid? Moi? Paranoia doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
  • I'm just curious about the space this would take up. Ideas?
    Every telephone call made and received by a member of the public, all emails sent and received and every web page looked at would be recorded.

    Does that mean every time I (that is, if I were in Britain) check /. it makes a copy of the page at that point in time? And are they going to be recording the phone calls? How about faxes? Attachments to emails?

    60 million people * 365 * 7 years = 153 billion people-days of info. Lets be conservative and say it only takes 100K to store every phone call, web page visit, and email made by the average (not everyone is a /. junkie) person in a day, with compression.

    100K * 153B = 15,300 Terrabytes.

    --

  • This bill is obviously a result of a conspiracy between all hard drive manufacturers in order to make a huge profit off of the British Government. There can be no other possible answer.

    ;-)
  • They just want to listen in on free porn calls.
    Those bastards!



    ----------
  • Perhaps the most classic quote or freudian slip was Home Office minister Paul Boateng saying the government would strive to get the balance right between the demands of industry and the demands of law enforcement . No mention, then, of the demands of the citizen for privicy in that balancing act.
  • Try these quotes:
    In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him.
    Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
    Still think the war is really going on?
  • Hey,

    I put an ADSL-like line into each ISP going to my bunker, and simply store it as a datastream.

    I wouldn't go with ADSL... that won't be fast enough once we get to the frighteningly high-tech stage where normal people can actually *buy* ADSL. I'd go for a maximum-speed leased line. They go up to 512MBps - half a gigabyte per second. Two or three to every major ISP POP, and you're ready to go.

    Suddenly, my program that generates random data, pgp-encrypts it by a (random) private key and e-mails it to a network of friends when I don't have my dial-up connection saturated doesn't seem very paranoid at all...

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • you forget that the RIP bill gave our government the rights to ask us to hand over any public/private keys or passwords whatever for decryption.. they can even ask us for our ATM pincodes if they want.. and if we have forgotten.. or refused.. 3yrs in the slammer..

    and if we tell anyone our security has been compromised.. thats a further 5..
  • Strong crypto applied to voice communications (phones) and to email, etc. (generally, to all point-to-point person-to-person communications) - this will probably make this "log" a little less useful for the government.

    Ultimately, the gov't will use this to prey on the lazy or less well informed. Why? Because smart crooks (yes they exist) will be making massive use of strong crypto as will all the geeks who just have no interest in the government reading _THEIR_ stuff (be it pr0n, their sappy love letters, or hearing their telephone calls to 976 numbers).

    And of course, one way to make this a royal pain in the ass for the gov't once you have broadband always-up access and crypto - send lots and lots and lots of useless traffic around. The gov't won't be able to differentiate meaningful and non-meaningful traffic in their logs... and so they will have to crack it all.

    And crypto on voice systems will also serve to make the audio logs unintelligible without decrypt gear.

    This is a retarded idea on several levels: It isn't wise to give the gov't this kind of power (even if it is rather benign like the UK gov't), it isn't technically feasible as things stand today without stupifying financial inputs, it is easy to compromise/oppose to render it even less feasible, and ultimately the only purpose one can define for it is to aide in the apprehension of the truly stupid (Anyone with any smarts won't be caught by it).

    Taken altogether, this says "waste of taxpayers money" to me. Smacks of Empire building in the UK intelligence apparatus (but hey, Empire building is a UK tradition, eh?).

    This reminds me of a quotation that seems to fit:
    Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
  • This is a classic example of the current snowballing tendancy to entangle ignorance of technology as a result of fear. Anyone can see that this is an unpractical and unethical idea (at least in the way it has currently been put forward), and witnessing numerous copycat attempts by countries to "catch up", many, frankly stupid false pretences have been made by governments and "Intelligence" services claiming they are in control of the situation, yet failing to realise the implications of their panicked reactions. IMHO, the fact that anyone could think this is going to work only re-emphasises their ignorance. However, if they even TRY and implement such a sick and ridiculous concept, I'll be the first to leave (not as a result of threat, but of despair).
  • Even if they were to take on this mammoth enterprise, and actually get it to work, how does logging transactions act as a serious blow to democracy? I mean really, having the right to elect your officials has nothing to do with how they conduct the business and security of they country unless you are unable to vote again.

    Dear Mr glebite. We here in the Government Surveillance Service noticed your presence at a rally that was called to protest the new Housing and Urban Development low-income housing in your neighborhood. Please be aware that HUD considers these sorts of activities to be discriminatory in nature, and under U.S. law you are subject to a $50,000 fine and a year in a federal prison. We will overlook your transgression this time, but any future participation in these sorts of activities will be dealt with in the harshest possible terms. We will be watching. Sincerely, the GSS.

    Obviously the above is a parody, but HUD really did threaten some homeowners for organizing to oppose low-income housing. The nature of government is to use every tool at its disposal to get its way. Letting goverment keep records of your every movement and telephone conversation is just begging them to use them against you. I offer the Clinton administration trashing of people's reputations using 'confidential' government records as prime evidence of just how this sort of thing can be abused.

  • The Queen is an extremely important part of the British Constitution.

    1)For a Bill of Parliament to become Law, it has to be signed by the Queen. This means that in the event of some Adolf Hitler type being elected, the Queen has the capacity to frustrate his ambitions.

    2)The Army, Air Force, Navy, Police Force etc etc all swear loyalty to the Queen, not to an elected official. This is extremely important and stabilising. In the event of instability in the country, an attempted coup or whatever, the Queen can call on the forces to obey her, and not some tyrant. In a day to day sense, it means that the forces can be more impartial. Can you imagine if they sweared loyalty to Ken Livingstone? Yuk.

    3)The Queen is the fount of soveriegnty in Britain - all power flows from her and is exercised in her name. This is extremely useful in the light of encroachments from the EU and such bodies, so expect it to be challenged at some point by the Liberals. Of course they will provide arguments involving 'Democracy' and 'Modernity' and such nonsense, but that is just a front. They really want to submerge Britain and the British Identity into a European superstate.

    An example of the usefulness and stabilising influence of a Monarchy can be found in Spain in 1974(?), when an attempted coup was foiled by the King, who rallied rebel troops and beurocrats who were supposed to be loyal to him, and him alone, not some rabble rousing general.

    You may say "But that would never happen in Britain - we haven't had a revolution since 1688" but have you ever wondered why we have had such a stable governance, while Frenchies and Germans seem to revolt every ten years?

    And who know what things may be like in one or two hundred years.

    I just wish the Queen would exercise some of her powers now, and thwart some of Blairs more outrageous suggestions.

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • Please could someone rectify the negative moderation of the parent post (currently at 0:Troll) which makes a valid and correct point. It is important to distinguish between democracy and freedom. Democracy is merely a system where a country's population have a large say in how their country is run. Democracy says nothing about freedom. Freedom sometimes needs to be given a higher priority than democracy in order to limit tyranny of the masses.

    This fact is especially clear in a country like the US where they have a written constitution. If any legislation violates the constitution it is found to be illegal. But when was the last time Americans voted on whether to keep the constitution? They don't need to ever vote to keep their constitution because even though it can get in the way of democracy (by stopping elected reps from passing certain laws) it is there to guarantee freedom.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • " The lack of respect for personal privacy remains a hole in the current US constitution's Bill of Rights. With information becoming a central plank of people's lives in a way never before seen, perhaps it's time an amendment to bring the 4th into the 21st Century."

    This will never happen. The marketing industry and law enforcement's lobbys will never let this happen. The US government is rotten with corruption, hence laws like the DMCA passed unanimously in virtual secrecy.

    It's better to argue that because of the 4th, 5th and 10th amendments, plus the 14th (right to not be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law) already cover government snooping, which they actually do.

    What would be the point of amending the Constitution anyway, when the problem is the federal government since 1933 has basically ignored any Constitutional restriction on it's power?

  • Re:You have to trust the government. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:27AM (#585720)
    As someone who lives in the UK I thought it was quite amusing.

    Irony/sarcasm [effingpot.com] - The cornerstones of British humour. This is one of the biggest differences between the nations. The sense of humour simply doesn't translate too well.

  • I live near Cheltenham and know several people who have worked or are currently working at GCHQ. Obviously they never go into details, and I wouldn't want them to, but the issue of unfocused data trawling often comes up and is always laughed at.

    In my opinion- and I do not work at GCHQ and nobody there would ever say anything as direct as this- GCHQ neither wants nor needs the ability to search archives of all emails ever sent.

    GCHQ have never and will never get involved in an unfocused trawling excercise. Why?

    • Firstly, because it is impractical and will always remain impractical. Even with GCHQ's massive supercomputing power, the amount of data created in a day will always far exceed any processing ability to trawl it with any accuracy.

    • Secondly, because such unfocused trawls produce a very poor signal to noise ratio. GCHQ quite frankly don't have the time to investigate if you've had an affair with your wife's sister, or avoided a parking ticket, or made a boring first post to Slashdot. Neither do they care. They have far more important things to be doing.

    What GCHQ and the police do want and already have is the ability to monitor particular network junction points for specific traffic to/from known individuals- namely those they have a reasonable suspicion are involved in terrorism, warmongering, child porn and economic warfare. For this they can already get a wiretap order signed by the Home Secretary.

    If GCHQ have a good reason to want to read your email, they will pop a tap on your connection and be done with it. Maybe they might catch a few conversations between uninvolved people in the same premises, but that's it.

    GCHQ do not wish to be forced to trawl through several billion useless emails to get to half a dozen important messages. If you're under the spotlight, they just want your messages, not everybody else's. No change in law is required to enable such focused wiretapping.

    Every so often, some slack-jawed nanny civil servant puts forward the idea of unfocused data trawling. Every so often, GCHQ tell the annoying little squirts that they have far better things to be doing with their CPU cycles.

    --

  • A little more data:

    JANET's US-to-UK transatlantic links transferred a total of 1803765.15 Megabytes yesterday.

    That's 1.72 Terabytes a day, or 4.395 Exabytes in 7 years, and that's assuming traffic doesn't keep doubling every year, which it is expected to at LEAST do.

    Someone was linking Sun's 11.8 Terabyte tape array. You'd need 373 of them to store all this online where you could retrieve it. Government pricing on those is about $250,000 a pop, you could probably get a quantity discount for ordering several hundred of them. Let's say you don't, so it's $250,000 apiece. That's $93.25 million US$.

    Then you gotta buy the tapes; they hold 35GB apiece, so you need 128,589 of them. They're about $80 apiece, so that's another $10 million US, assuming none of them wear out and have to be replaced, and again assuming traffic stops doubling every year.

    Even if you could store that, how many months would it take to run a query against it?

    And that's just US-to-UK and UK-to-US traffic. UK to anywhere else isn't accounted for.

    -
  • Usenet traffic alone is over 100Gb a DAY.

    They want to preserve that for 7 years.

    That's 255.5 Terabytes, just for Usenet.

    Usenet is a drop in the bucket compared to web traffic.

    Columbia University estimates that Average data traffic for the year 2000 is 4.451 Terabits per SECOND.

    By 2002, it's estimated to be 27.645 Terabits per second. That's worldwide, of course, not British.

    I doubt there's enough disk and tape capacity worldwide to store a month of it, much less 7 years.

    We're talking 298.566 Exabytes per day in 2002.

    Perhaps these idiots should look at the statistics [columbia.edu] before they pass a law that they can't possibly fund.

    -

  • EngSoc (Score:3)

    by redhog ( 15207 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:28AM (#585724) Homepage
    English socialism

    1948, the time was badly predicted. But the history not. It didn't happen 1984, but 2048 it will all have happened...

  • Re:Brittish Boston Party? (Score:3)

    by GC ( 19160 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @07:14AM (#585725)
    people living in Cornwall

    we have people living in Cornwall? I thought they were apes.

  • Millenium Dome (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:53AM (#585726) Journal
    There's a use for the Millenium Dome when the tourist trade drops off: Archival Storage Facility.

  • Re:Debunkathon Time! (Score:3)

    by jcupitt65 ( 68879 ) on Monday December 04, 2000 @02:26AM (#585727)
    It's not clear from the BBC piece, but it looks like they're proposing to log *connections*, not content.

    http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/internetnews/ st ory/0,7369,406484,00.html

    (not much better from a freedom point of view, but at least technically possible)

  • Okay... (Score:3)

    by glebite ( 206150 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:02AM (#585728)

    Even if they were to take on this mammoth enterprise, and actually get it to work, how does logging transactions act as a serious blow to democracy? I mean really, having the right to elect your officials has nothing to do with how they conduct the business and security of they country unless you are unable to vote again.

    This is one of those silly statements that really irks me - the debate between freedom and security in a democracy. The real issue here is do you really want the government to know that you send emails or correspond with whoever it is that you correspond with.

    Would these transaction logs be available to your company? Your estranged loved-one while you are going through a divorce? Could these be used in a civil court of law? Or are these STRICTLY used by the government in an effort and means to reduce seedy activities by seedy people?

  • Re:London is already under surveillance (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03, 2000 @08:27AM (#585729)
    A while back a friend of mine was mugged and beaten up. Thanks to those cameras the people who did it were caught and charged within a week. I like to feel safe when walking around town at night, and this helps me to.

    Let me get this right. You 'feel safe' because AFTER your friend was beaten up and mugged, the cops managed to catch the crooks, who probably got their wrists slapped and were released with a small fine or suspended sentence. AFTER THEY WERE MUGGED AND BEATEN UP!!!!

    Wow! I must say, knowing that AFTER I GET MUGGED AND BEATEN UP the cops may be able to use the cameras to catch the crooks really makes me feel SO safe.

    Particularly when the local store-owners where I live in the UK have been complaining about the sizable increase in robberies since the cops installed cameras and stopped patrolling. Oddly enough, the crooks have worked out that there's a simple solution to camera surveillance: it's called 'a mask'. Now they know that they can rob the stores with impunity, with the only risk being that possibly, if they're really unlucky, one day the cops might be able to track them down from a video; that makes them feel safe, compared to the old days when they ran the risk of being caught by a police patrol as they actually commited the crime.

    Ah well, I'm out of here as soon as I find a better nation to move to; have fun in your ultra-safe police state where you know that after you get mugged and beaten up the cops may be able to catch the guy, if they weren't smart enough to wear a mask.

  • Not so bad? (Score:4)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:19AM (#585730) Homepage
    Cool, no more need to do my own backups!

  • Re:Brittish Boston Party? (Score:4)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @10:49AM (#585731) Journal
    Technically I doubt it's a problem. I work in the video/film post-production industry. On a film shoot, you can get (say) 40 Terabytes of data coming in every day on DTF tape. All that happens is the tape is thrown into a robot the size of a warehouse. Now, to access that tape I just do something similar to 'cp /array/Scene_xxx/Shot_yyy/frame_zzz my.local.file'. What's my point ? IT WORKS BOTH WAYS. I can put a feed (hell, this is an ISP/fibre-forest location!) to a Petasite (that's what these robots are called) and transparently copy all data from the ISP line to my central location. All I need to do for maintenance is unload tapes that fill and load up blank new ones. Everything else is managed.

    So say I have a capacity of 100 Pb (Petabytes) in a huge wartime bunker under Hyde Park (Central London, for those who don't know). I put an ADSL-like line into each ISP going to my bunker, and simply store it as a datastream. Petasites running SAM-FS use several Terabytes of disk as a cache onto the tapes - all you do is write the file to a disk, SAM-FS copes with archiving it to tape using a prioritised LRU algorithm.

    Every tape holds (standard DTF) 42Gb. Every day I change (say) 100 tapes max. Get monkeys to do it. 100 tapes gives me 4.2Tb/day using DTF, significantly larger than 1.7Tb/day... Assume tape storage goes up roughly with bandwidth use, even if it doesn't you can employ more monkeys!

    Store tapes ordered by date. Have a separate (small) robot for queries. Insert tapes for time period and employ (presumably custom written) query tools. All the tools have to do is pretend they're looking at a network datastream (netmon!) and have some query/report on top of that. Do datamining if you want, but it's not necessary.

    As for costs, even smallish (40 people) Post-production houses can have a (admittedly single-robot :-) Petasite running. I personally know of two in Soho. Budget 7 million pounds (*way* over the top, even including running costs) for the robots, and 13 million for tapes (100/day, #50/tape * 365 * 7). 20 million quid? pocket money!

    What you also have to remember is that the British (how would you like being called Ammericans? :-) Government have just passed the RIP (sic!) bill specifically to implement this spying within the law.

    It seems to me it should be possible to circumvent though. Should be pretty easy to adapt the ideas behind spread-spectrum wireless comms to wired comms using cryptographic signatures to verify the integrity of the request. Given a co-operating network of servers to which (using PKC) you submit requests (for the same page but different portions of it using Range: headers), which further split the requests between themselves and others, I don't see how they could track you down.

    All they'd be able to say was that you submitted a request to a 'reflection-server' and it sent some data back to you, and during that time the 'reflection server' also visited all these porn sites '...'

    I know I'm going to take a hard look at encryption technologies everywhere within my business now. I think you can get around the 'we can demand your keys' RIP clause by setting up a webserver with an HTTPS connection somewhere abroad (or in SeaLand :-) and using HTTP-uploads on that HTTPS connection to POST files to the webserver.At that point I think you could prove you didn't have the cryptographic key (and so avoid being sent to jail!). This is all IMHO of course, but I think we'll be opening a foreign web presence soon!

    ATB,
    Simon.

  • disturbing... (Score:4)

    by colmore ( 56499 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:01AM (#585732) Journal
    wasn't 1984 set in Britain?

  • A man that would sacrifice his freedom (Score:4)

    by lupine ( 100665 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @12:28PM (#585733) Journal
    When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered.
    -Dorothy Thompson

    If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any less than slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
    -Herbert Spencer

    Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth ever afterward resumes its liberty.
    -Walt Whitman

    The foolish and the uneducated have little use for freedom.
    -Anonymous

    A man that would sacrifice his freedom for security deserves neither.
    -Thomas Jefferson

  • Brittish Boston Party? (Score:5)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @05:59AM (#585734) Journal
    Cool, I wanna see what Brittish taxpayers will say when someone will try to implement such thing... Because only two thingies will come out of this. First it will be impossible, technically and humanly, to hold up, control, process and manipulate such level of information. A week on logging more than 2 thousand users is enough to overkill your best servers (I'm not talking about this iXXX trashcan arch), fill up the capacity of your disks (reaching a good 300 gigs) and turn every channel into a 2400 bps link in the end term. People did this and came into the conclusion it is MADNESS to try hunting everyone and everything.

    But what is more funny is the financial part... Such surveillance eats up to 80% of communication costs in the end... And it will be VERY FUNNY to see Brittish users paying for such...

  • Re:Brittish Boston Party? (Score:5)

    by GC ( 19160 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:53AM (#585735)
    You do realise that we pay through the nose for telephone calls over here already?

    Thinking about the cost per megabyte and past proposals for an "Information Tax"... I wouldn't say that it's all that far fetched...

    300Gigs is a small disk array in business terms.

    Here's [netapp.com] product sheet on a 6-Terabyte Filer well within the capacity of being bought by the Government and being installed in every local telephone exchange.

    Data communications can be compressed up and stored on these, analogue (voice) calls could be parsed through voice recognition systems and also compressed. Hell, when they run out of space they'll start dumping the old stuff to tape [sun.com]. (Ahem... Sun's 11-Terabyte solution). If these types of solutions are available commercially just think what the governments of the developed world will have available to them. The two products I just speced out would fit in a rather small datacentre.

    Put this configuration in each telephone exchange and keeping records of all calls is just a matter of buying the tapes!!!

    On another note, we're not, in general, as concerned with privacy here in the UK as much as you guys are in the US. We've had thousands of Closed Circuit cameras installed throughout our streets since the '80s (What with IRA bombing campaigns etc...) and for many people, especially women, it has instilled security for the general public as opposed to fear. Are we mis-guided? I'm not saying that I agree that my telephone conversations can be recorded, but if they're just going to be archived to tape then it doesn't bother me extremely. Hell, I would think that they are just as likely to protect me as they might incriminate me.

    GC

  • Re:Brittish Boston Party? (Score:5)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @07:03AM (#585736) Journal
    Data communications can be compressed up and stored on these, analogue (voice) calls could be parsed through voice recognition systems and also compressed.

    I'm sorry but I can't see how that is technically possible. I'm half English, spent a lot of my life in England, and I still can't tell what the hell the people living in Cornwall are saying. I swear it must be English but I just can't parse a bloody word of it. I can't see how a voice recognition program could do any better!

  • Debunkathon Time! (Score:5)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby@com[ ]t.net ['cas' in gap]> on Sunday December 03, 2000 @09:44AM (#585737)
    Time to debunk this into the FUD that it is. This will never happen for a number of very practical reasons:

    First, if this actually stood, the stock of hard drive manufactures would jump through the roof. When East Germany did this kind of thing, they had very significant amounts of resources devoted just to storing the data. Even using recordable DVD systems from companies like Dictaphone still takes a lot of resources.

    You have to be able to use the data. I know this sounds self evident, but it doesn't matter how much data you have if you aren't capable of using it. Such a database would quickly overwhelm anything else in the world, even WalMarts'. You have to get the important info to humans to analyze. Too much info, and you can't manage it.

    This violates 3 important acts that have are active in Britian according to the Observer:

    1.Human Rights Act

    2.European Union Law

    3.Data Protection Act

    The Europeans are /much/ more sensitive on privacy issues than the US. After dealing with Communist goverments for several decades, can you blame them? This would be a particular problem with the German goverment, which is still going through data seized from the East Germans over a decade ago.

    The bottom line, cost, the article in the observer claims that they will set it up for 3 million pounds (about $5 million) and maintain it for 9 million pounds (about $14 million). The amount of money they are talking about probably wouldn't even buy the hardware that they need. They also have to look at building space, lots and lots of building space, near a POP on the backbone (naturally very expensive land). People, this requires enterprise class database administrators. Not only are these people rare, but you have to get them to all pass background checks.

    This also isn't practical on an infrastructure standpoint. You have to be able to support such a system in small towns and rural areas that have trouble supporting what they have. Such a system would probably require a carnivore like setup, and they just might use Carnivore if they went with it. There is a long history of cooperation between the Brits and US intelligence networks, why would this be any different? The amount of data collected by a system like carnivore has got to be enormous, imagine what it would be when you tell it to collect everything. This leads to the next point -

    There isn't enough bandwidth. Assumably data collected at distributed points (like ISP's) would be forwarded to a centralized database (you do want to cross-index it don't you?). This isn't the kind of thing you drop in the post, or have Fed-Ex bring. Such a system would demand real time updating if it is going to be used for active monitoring of drug deals etc. They would have to send this over the Internet, and that would require a massive infrastructure overhaul by BT. The cost of the amount of bandwidth required alone would be exorbitant, far beyond the 9 million pound cost that is the supposed budget. Than you have the cost of overhauling rural and small town infrastructure. If you only have a single E1 going to a town, you can't just buy more bandwidth, you have to lay cable.

    The last reason is Political Ramifications. There are very serious human rights concerns with something like this. Not only will the citizens of Britian be upset about this, but the EU will probably not be very happy either.

  • You have to trust the government. (Score:5)

    by Kiss the Blade ( 238661 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:10AM (#585738) Journal
    Personally, and speaking as a British Subject, I have no problem with these moves. In some other countries, such as Germany or the USA, these moves would be unnacceptable; this is because the populations of these countries do not trust their government, and rightly, given their histories.

    However, Britain has the strongest tradition of democracy and free speech in the world, and has indeed defined many aspects of these institutions. Free speech has been guarranteed under Law for some 785 years. Also, Britain is a small and densly populated country, meaning that the typival Briton knows and trusts his fellow man.

    Britain has no need of written constitutions, freedom laws etc etc. In Britain, the institutions of government are trusted and respected, and can be relied upon to do their job in a fair manner.

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • Comment removed (Score:5)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 03, 2000 @06:22AM (#585739)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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