1984 - European Style

[Tequila Zaire]

The EU's Data Retention Bill has been causing concerns and fears amoung the sane and free world for a few years now. It's a strange Bill that spawned out of Ireland would pretty much require telecommunications operators to store traffic information about fax, mobile and phone calls, and email and internet usage, for three years.

Now getting straight answers on how this is all developing is not a fun process...at all. But the idea of it and seeing as it has support from France, Sweden, and the Brits...it's kinda scary. Off The Hook (The 2600 related weekly radio show) goes into a bit of detail on it that's worth listening too.

You can download it here: http://www.2600.com/offthehook/2004/1004.html

It's the 10-13 one....the info pops up about 16min into the show.

It's developing a lot like the idea of prevention what the states have with the Department of Homeland Security. Now at first one has to wonder how on earth a system that would work. The sheer amount of data would be epic...who would have access to it? Who looks through it? How is it regulated and sorted? How is the data destroyed? Is it secure?...all this stuff comes up and as we all know data is not all that secure these days in a fail safe manner.

Getting hard info on this sateside is kind of hard so if any european board members have more detailed and accurate info...please share.

[Nightingale]

The States have been reading sent information for a number of years, collating through specific buzzwords which are updated as and when deemed necessary. Initially it isn't a human that gets hands on to this stuff, the computers sort through and then rate everything before passing it on. I guess that's why so many states are interested in stopping encryption ...

[Tequila Zaire]

The States have been reading sent information for a number of years, collating through specific buzzwords which are updated as and when deemed necessary. Initially it isn't a human that gets hands on to this stuff, the computers sort through and then rate everything before passing it on. I guess that's why so many states are interested in stopping encryption ...

Well in terms of intelligence gathering...all nations do that. It's part of the basics in any foreign intelligence office. In terms of stopping encryption...the FBI made a stink about it a few years back with cell phone encryption...even had those back door chips installed...but watchdog groups usually derail that stuff...even with the patriot act we have now...slowly it's falling apart on many levels...nearly all of them on a tech industry level.

Of course none of this makes headlines outside of tech news sites liek slashdot and wired.

[Nightingale]

Of course none of this makes headlines outside of tech news sites liek slashdot and wired.

That's right, except for the loophole filling act that's being brought in to give the intelligence gathering agencies more powers over homeland spying, as opposed to over overseas spying.