Oz Govt Pushes Ahead With ISP Customer Data Retention 67
angry tapir writes "The Australian federal government is pushing ahead with reforms that could see consumers' information kept on file for up to two years by ISPs. This could include the data retention of personal Internet browsing information which intelligence agencies could access in the event of criminal activities by individuals or organizations."
Conclusion of the report... (Score:5, Interesting)
How could they even begin to do this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see where it stipulates what would need to be retained. Is it merely header information? A list of URLs (SSL will break this)? A copy of the data itself?
No matter which direction this goes, it seems to me that it would be very, very easy to overwhelm them with data. Fire off a perl script that connects to $giant_list_of_random_URLs 500 times a minute. Turn it down when you need to do work, crank it up when you go to bed... and you're suddenly costing them an enormous amount of storage while turning their signal to noise ratio into crap.
Re:Conclusion of the report... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah, what we really need is a program that just sits there all day doing random DNS lookups and loading the web pages...let 'em try and store exabytes of data and try to find anything useful in it.
Re:Conclusion of the report... (Score:4, Interesting)
But this can be done. Ban all encrypted traffic not specifically authorized by the authorities. This way, the first SSH/VPN connection to somewhere, and the cops come knocking at your door. Those using Wifi will be limited to plain HTTP, enough for the feeble (Facebook people) to post and check their accounts.
The big "trusted" media companies can be granted exceptions for their DRM in exchange for having server-side monitoring software (backdoors) installed in their systems.
The passive Pirate Bay-style of trying to run circles around government Internet policies will fail in the long run, unless accompanied by some sort of active political resistance, be it Net-only site "black outs" or flesh-and-banner street protests.