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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