The UK wants ISPs to store all of their traffic data

PistolPete said:
I've always been in the "I have nothing to hide so they (the Government) can monitor what they like" camp, but it's getting to be a bit of a joke with them wanting to log everything these days on the off chance that they might catch someone doing wrong.
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The trouble with the "I have nothing to hide" argument here though is you can't assume that your internet activity doesn't look 'suspicious' to a body who will have a whole number of things they consider dodgy. Also, this will only tell the police what sites you visited, it has no idea how long you were there, if you read anything at all or whether you went there by mistake or purposely.

Imagine this, you're dying your hair so you look up peroxide on Wikipedia to see how it may affect you. 2 days later you're having a discussion here about Afghanistan and you click on a poster's link that takes you to a Jihadist website. The following day your nephew comes round and asks you how planes fly so you go the internet and look up images of commercial airliner cross section diagrams.

A copper then looks at your activity for the week and sees you've gone to an Al Qa'ida website, looked up information on a plane's structure and read about one of the key ingredients in a home made explosive. All the while the actual terrorists are using VPNs and proxies to bypass the surveillance.

I realise that 'at first' the police will have to jump through hoops to get this data and it won't be real time monitoring as used in my example above, but once the systems are in place then live analysis of the data becomes the next logical step.

The police will simply justify it by saying it's no different to Google or Youtube analysing your traffic and building up a 'profile' of you, just like how they are saying this will be 'no different to their access to phone records'.
 
estebanrey said:
Only on your computer via 'history'. Why would ISPs voluntarily set up expensive server farms to stores the billions of messages that run through their servers each week?



Well no, otherwise this wouldn't be a new law and would just fall under the same rules that allow police officers to obtain phone records (which are kept generally regardless of the state requiring them do specifically do so).
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i thought it was their prerogative to keep logs of websites accessed, you know, kiddy fiddlers, terrorists, piracy etc etc. When i used darkVPN they used the 'no web logs' as a selling point for the VPN, hence why i assumed ISPs did it
 
twist3d0n3 said:
i thought it was their prerogative to keep logs of websites accessed, you know, kiddy fiddlers, terrorists, piracy etc etc. When i used darkVPN they used the 'no web logs' as a selling point for the VPN, hence why i assumed ISPs did it
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By why is it in the ISPs interest to catch terrorist or kiddy fiddlers?
 
panyan said:
it wouldnt surprise me if it was 500GB/s in 2012
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Would it surprise you if double that flows through just LINX every day??

day
 
Burnsy2023 said:
For this reason alone this whole idea is not feasible.
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Storage of sender / recipient data is trivial and no different from an Exchange log, assign a number to each unique email address and the data becomes highly compressible.

The throughput required to shred such data is immense, it's unlikely an ISP would be able to use a single node to do this. Although the email going via an ISP's own mail server would be logged anyway.
 
bitslice said:
Storage of sender / recipient data is trivial and no different from an Exchange log, assign a number to each unique email address and the data becomes highly compressible.

The throughput required to shred such data is immense, it's unlikely an ISP would be able to use a single node to do this. Although the email going via an ISP's own mail server would be logged anyway.
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That is true for email, but different to web traffic. Turn on the network debugger in your browser when you visit a website and look at the number of subsequent requests that go on. It will just push the people the system intends to catch to use more sophisticated tools for communicating, or just encrypt/anonymise their traffic.

Storing this amount of transactional data is going to be real expensive, easy to circumvent, and is fraught with privacy, moral, and other technical issues.
 
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BlackDragon said:
That is true for email, but different to web traffic. Turn on the network debugger in your browser when you visit a website and look at the number of subsequent requests that go on. It will just push the people the system intends to catch to use more sophisticated tools for communicating, or just encrypt/anonymise their traffic.

Storing this amount of transactional data is going to be real expensive, easy to circumvent, and is fraught with privacy, moral, and other technical issues.
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True, but just store the DNS result returned, then you have requester and site IP. Maybe capturing each link clicked has slightly more overhead.
 
Hostile17 said:
The same reason it is in a pubs interest not to sell to anyone under age or to anyone heavily intoxicated. Responsible provision of services.
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Well no what stops pubs selling to underage and drunk people is the law and hefty fines for breaking it.

Plus you also have the fact a pub is a place everyone has to share so even without laws on drinking, they'd still have to strike a balance between immediate sales and angering current customers and potentially losing out later.

An ISP not monitoring for kiddie fiddlers or terrorists does not effect the rest of their customer base in any way.
 
estebanrey said:
Well no, otherwise this wouldn't be a new law and would just fall under the same rules that allow police officers to obtain phone records (which are kept generally regardless of the state requiring them do specifically do so).
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My bad. It was dressed up to be 'Anti terrorism' but was later changed to 'Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security' which is basically anything the government want to call unsavoury.

This act goes further in the sense of snooping content, rather than just URLs.

The "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is a false dichotomy. It's like "Either you're with us, or you're against us" - it's perfectly possible neither is true and you just don't want to be involved.
I have plenty of embarrassing things I want to keep hidden or forgotten (drunken texts, stupid pictures on nights out), none of which are illegal but are preferably forgotten about.

Horizon17 said:
The same reason it is in a pubs interest not to sell to anyone under age or to anyone heavily intoxicated. Responsible provision of services.
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Why do car manufacturers sell cars that can go more than 70mph? Why sell bottles of alcohol far in excess of a single day's intake? Why serve meals which have more than a day's worth of calories in them?
All of these things potentially lead to harming the individual and those around them.
 
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