DOJ proposes US data-rentention law.
Steve Fulton
steve at esoteric.ca
Sat Jun 22 11:55:26 EDT 2002
At 18:57 21/06/2002 -0700, John Young wrote:
>Data retention is being done now by programs and services
>which cache data to ease loading on servers and networks.
>[...]
John,
As a systems administrator @ an ISP, I can tell flat out that the software
you describe has nothing to do with ISP services. The software provides
caching services for telecom companies (ie. billing, WAP, voice mail alerts
etc). I see nothing that mentions typical ISP services, like e-mail or
web-browsing. It is software designed to impress the executive level with
pie charts and promises of reduced hardware costs. No one likes spending
$50k on a NAS or Fibre Channel / RAID 10 box.
Next time John, I suggest you turn your sites on caching software like
Squid. Know what? I'm not even afraid to provide the URL!
http://www.squid-cache.org .. you may even discover it has US Intelligence
Community(tm) links, dating back many years! Incredible, huh? ISP's like
the one I work for use Squid to save on bandwidth costs by caching
oft-visited websites. Unfortunately, we (like most if not all ISP's)
cannot afford the massive disk arrays (or the space they would take up,
even the electricity) that would be necessary to retain data *for one
day*. Geez, I don't think the government gonna like that.
That's doesn't even bring us to the technical abilities of all the
different pieces of software that must be re-written (en masse) to satisfy
government desires. For instance, let's try e-mail software.. There are
numerous companies and individuals who offer their own versions of e-mail
server software. Microsoft's Exchange and Ipswitch's IMail for the Windows
crowd who like spending lots of money, or Qmail, Postfix, Exim and even
Sendmail for the Unix crowd. There are dozen's more, but you get the
point. All that software will need to be rewritten. Then all the e-mail
servers will need to be upgraded and tested. THEN more disk space added
just to handle all the extraneous information like from who and to, from
where (say originating IP and from what server host and IP) etc etc etc ad
nauseam. Whoops! Let's not forget tape backups! I'm buying 3M stock
come Monday! But what happens if we have a disk failure and the logs are
lost? Hmm...
Anyway, that is just for e-mail.. Imagine what HTTP, or FTP, or whatever
can't-live-without service someone invents in the future? Data retention
is unworkable even to the biggest of companies. Even the NSA cannot store
that kind of data without a significant (and secret) budget. The only ones
deriving any benefit from this are law enforcement and computer hardware &
commercial software manufacturers. Maybe its an economic stimulus package
in disguise?
-- Steve.
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