Details of all internet traffic should be logged – MEP A member of the European Parliament wants users' "traffic data", rather than the specific content of online communications, to be logged under expanded EU laws on data storage. This is according to a statement from the European People's Party (EPP) at the European Parliament. Tiziano Motti, an Italian MEP, wants to extend the …
As soon as I saw the headline I knew this idiot would be using societies' current biggest bogeyman - the microscopic number of paedophiles in humanity - to drum up fear and thus credibility for his plan to pry on EVERYONE else.
Personally I've got nothing at all to hide but I still care not one bit from some overpaid, unelected MEP plonker wanting to have my data logged.
most of this sort of tracking is already done. A bit of good, old fashioned police work garnished with a few court orders should get enough information to link person A with activity B if B was done on or via the internet without the aid of something like TOR.
Times, IP addresses, DHCP leases, MAC addresses, security camera footage of net cafes and the like... presumably mobile networking logs DHCP sessions, base station IDs, and IMEI numbers or whatever the nG equivalent of MAC addresses is and so on. What does this guy expect to gain? A magical 'whodunnit' service which prints out the name and address of whoever posted or downloaded some image on the interwebs at the press of a button?
I wonder how well it'll work on non-european systems.
"The odd thing is, most of this sort of tracking is already done. A bit of good, old fashioned police work garnished with a few court orders should get enough information to link person A with activity B if B was done on or via the internet without the aid of something like TOR."
That's the point though. At the moment the authorities have to work to get the stuff, which means they only go to the effort if they think it is worth it. I want them to have to work and get court orders to do this. Then there is less chance of abuse than there is if you can just type someone's name into your screen and get all that persons on-line activity with the click of a mouse.
"unelected" - just because *you* didn't vote for him, doesn't mean he's unelected.
At least in Italy the majority of people bothered to vote (65%). Here in the UK, we barely got 35% turnout and you'd be embarrassed to see which countries got lower (Czech Rep, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia)
What we get in the UK was an opportunity to express a preference for a PARTY, not an MEP. When one of the MEPs allegedly representing me decided that they wanted out, the relevant party manager APPOINTED their replacement. No need for the tedious nuisance of an election. The MEP's primary accountability is therefore to their party managers, NOT to the electorate.
Compare and contrast with the situation that formerly prevailed in the USSR (15 marks).
What on earth is people's problem with the House of Lords not being elected? The House of Lords has been for the last century, a revising chamber rather than a legislative one. Its role is to look at the politically-motivated, knee-jerk stuff that comes out of the Commons, trim off the worst excesses and try to turn it into something akin to decent, acceptable law. When the two houses strongly disagree, the Commons always prevails. It's not elected, the members who do the work do so because they're genuinely interested in doing it, and it's (mostly) not appointed by whatever shower is currently in power, either. Blair and crowd did their damndest to stack it with enough of their cronies to let them push anything that they wanted, but not withstanding that, it's still a check on the worst excesses of the Commons. As such, it's the LAST body that ought to be looking over its shoulders at what the electors will say in two years time.
@HP Cynic: "Personally I've got nothing at all to hide but..."
Well then, please start by detailing your sex-life her on this comment thread. I'd like you to post pictures and movies of you in action too, since you have nothing to hide. I want to know every and all detail, no exceptions. And, please, attach a log of your activities and communication in minute detail too.
Lets see how much you have "nothing to hide".
@b0llchit
What a ludicrous position. Comments on such articles always deteriorate quickly and this is no exception. I also have nothing to hide. That is, nothing I'd hide from a court of law should I ever be in such an unfortunate position. However there's a world of difference between having nothing to hide from the law and posting details of every activity here. I bought my wife a christmas present this morning but if I post details of it hear then she, as a fellow reader, might see the comment which would make christmas that little bit less fun. Moronic.
Anyone supporting this proposal should be aware they have helped tilt the slippery slope just a bit more.
There will be a bureaucracy associated with this and it will need continual feeding with taxpayer funds.
By all means try and find a way to manage down the effects of porn and child/adult abuse but check whether this is the most effective way, first
What is the cost/benefit - and don't cry 'think of the children', because I am. I am looking for a 'better' solution with less negatives!
This post has been deleted by its author
I appreciate your comments, you're point of view is spot on - except on one, important point. You do have something to hide. We all do.. it's called your "privacy". Our private life, whether online, in the living room or whereever else is called that for a reason. We expect it, it's a human right recognised by many democratic constitutions as a necessity. We want our private lives private so we can do whatever we please without having the judgement of others impinging on our lifestyles, artistic expression or whatever else we choose to do with the limited time we have on this planet.
My own objection is that a politician of all people is going use the moral highground and say everyone should be watched in case we break the law.. I'm sorry, but does he not realise he's a politician? Does the term pot-kettle-black mean nothing to these people? There's a theory that thieves are the most paranoid about people stealing from them, which tells me a lot about paranoid politicians and the laws they want enacted. I'm thinking a quick gander at the photos he stores on his computer might be a good idea..
"Ghioni said his "precise mechanism" would need the "collaboration" of operating system manufacturers such as Microsoft and Apple to log all activities on their systems, according to the automated translation of the report."
My interpretation of this is system logs that are then uploaded to some central store.
What's next? We all wear pinhole cameras on our coats to monitor what we've been up to?
How soon before Linux becomes outlawed by not following this requirement?
Give me a break.
"I know sod-all about technology, but I am being paid lots of money by the voters, so I have to do something to make it look like I give a damn, and am working"
And call me cynical, but I bet that they would put something in the legislation to make them exempt. After all, they are so much better than the rest of us proles.
As it happens, my traffic is being monitored with my consent (for a small fee) - and if I choose I can bypass it. But that is the point; it is with my consent.
...........politician that is. I have in my lifetime seen more examples of bad, poorly thought out and counter-productive legislation "birthed" by some politico or other than almost any other source of changes to law/public policy (other than the results of the special interest lobbying industry of course). I won't bother to list the potential horrendous consequences of this idiot's proposals, it is obvious from the thread that posters are well aware of the damage that such stupidity could do. There are few more pernicious sources of bad law than a politician with a hard-on for personal publicity and a pathological need to be seen to being do something - anything, however bloody stupid it is.
"Ghioni said his "precise mechanism" would need the "collaboration" of operating system manufacturers such as Microsoft and Apple to log all activities on their systems, according to the automated translation of the report."
And presumably it would also have to make owning an old computer, or owning Linux, illegal? Or force them not to be able to connect to the Internet. Oh, and make reinstalling your operating system illegal. Oh, and proxies.
FAIL for obvious reasons.
Oh it sounds so measured, so reasonable. But it does mean investigating every last one of us to pick off the few bad apples, maybe. IIRC not the first time he's proposed another "think of the children" canard. Soon he'll have earned the "paver of the road to hell" merit badge.
Data retention has already been shown to not significantly help. It does promote taking dragnets to datastores, and that does indeed increase, sometimes lots. To me that indicates it promotes lazyness and facilitates arsecovering in a perverse sort of way.
There's so many better things you could be doing. You could be putting better effort into catching perps in the act, whatever they might be doing --if you need to single out notorious, uncommon and narrow hot buttons for such broad and general measures your arguments aren't very strong--, and for that you only need to be able to legally, with warrant in hand, tap any and all thing they might be using to communicate.
We're not trying to do extensive pro-active pre-suspicion traffic analysis spookery to the populace, are we? Or were you thinking more of lucrative side uses of all those black boxes and easily mislaid keys, don motti?
Actually, as far as it goes, this idea a bit too bland for our lot. All it means is an unimaginably big log. They'll want to spice it up a bit, pinpointing addresses and such so that the trace filters in use become just as unwieldy as the logs they produce or, at the very least, are a technically impossible to implement (e.g. DEA)
;)
Ok, let's pretend the solution is technically possible across all potential end systems, and fantasize that the privacy aspect can somehow be handled securely.
Does Tiziano Motti have a disk drive or tape manufacturing company based in his home town? Never mind explaining how the key can be stored by the user; who's storing all that traffic detail, on what, and who bought all that equipment? It might be inexpensive to operate (it wouldn't be really, but theoretically it could be), but what about to buy and install?
If the system were just going to store hashes, then I expect the sites they are worried about would install something to regularly modify their content enough to change the hash values. Somebody will need a permanent record of what the content actually looked like at the time of the download, so he's not just going to back up the internet, he's going to retain regular backup snapshots for months. Or did I miss a detail?
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