What is data retention (summary for non-EU readers)

Data retention is an EU directive mandating ISPs and telecom operators to store location and communication data for extended periods of time (6 months upwards). These data include telephone numbers of who called whom, location (from BTS), TCP connections where-from-time, mapping MAC address to user, email sender/receiver/time etc. Have a peek at wikipedia article for more information.

Though other countries have laws or proposals that are very similar in nature. Difference is only in data collected and duration of retention. For example, there was the “Protect Children from Internet Pornographers Act” proposal in USA which is “identical”, just the pretext is different.

Status of data retention in EU

At the moment, there are three EU countries that rejected the law (to my knowledge): Czech Republic, Germany and Romania (though wiki says “not implemented” for Sweden, too). In Czech Republic, the data retention was in effect until March 31st 2011 when Czech Constitutional Court declared parts of the law unconstitutional.

Deja-vu – data retention law is on the table again

On March 14th 2012 Czech parliament brought update of the said law to be discussed and voted on (the law is identified as 127/2005, name roughly translates as “Electronic Communications Act”). Even though some politicians appeared to oppose data retention in speech, 153 voted “yes” with only one “no” vote. It will take two more successful votes and president’s signature in order the law to pass (if I remember the process correctly and it hasn’t changed since).

Links to relevant original documents (PDF; only in Czech unfortunately):

Most important part of what is updated (note that I’m not a lawyer, so it may not be precise; I’ll have few lawyer look at it later):

ordinary people (i.e. not just companies) will have to log and retain data if they provide “means of electronic communication”. The “means of electronic communication” is defined vaguely enough that it could be interpreted for open wifi in restaurants or could apply to people running personal web server.

As an IT security professional I can say with great confidence that if the law ever helped or will help to convict a criminal, it must be a dumb criminal. A criminal that could be as well caught by “conventional” (non-mass-surveillance) means, like using old-fashioned court order to eavesdrop on specific individual or group (suspected of serious crime).

A smart criminal will buy access to “dark VPN”, i.e. a VPN that is built from botnet machines using a stolen credit card. Those botnets count millions of nodes. It’s practically infeasible (almost impossible) to track such criminal using data retention records. That’s what they are doing today and data retention won’t help. None of the successful attempts to dismantle botnets I’ve seen used data retention records (it was mostly researchers poking holes by exploiting botnets’ flaws).

It is no secret that it’s extremely easy to abuse data retention records. Just one example for illustration. Similar laws eventually lead to eavesdropping behemoths like NSA’s Stellar Wind project. Pushing such laws further tends to turn large fraction of population into snitches (along with organizations of the order of StB, Stasi, MOIS, Mukhabarat, SSI…take your pick). Slowly leading into darker and darker corners.

Let’s stop this mass surveillance nonsense once and for all

Seriously, this is second time I have to deal with data retention and I am furious that it steals my time I could use for actual work. It needs to be stopped in EU and other countries, “on as global scale as possible”. Otherwise it will just keep popping up; we know they’ll keep trying no matter what, but let’s show that it has popular opposition. Remember the anti-SOPA and anti-ACTA protests? Yeah, we need something like that.

I’d expect similar “pressure on disobedient countries” (meaning Germany and Romania) to re-enact data retention soon.

Few information portals that could get you started to find a local organization dealing with the respective part of law:

(Obviously, the above list is not exhaustive.)

If police, secret police or intelligence service wants to eavesdrop on someone, they should be required to obtain court order!

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