Data Storage by Irish Govt

national | miscellaneous | news report

Thursday November 28, 2002 09:09

by Shane

Sound lads! What next.

Department to store data on citizens for four years

Detailed personal data on every Irish citizen's phone and mobile calls, faxes, and e-mail and Internet usage will be retained for up to four years under a new Department of Justice Bill, writes Karlin Lillington

The Bill, which is being drafted and which the Minister, Mr McDowell, hopes to implement by next spring, requires that personal electronic data be retained for two to four years. At present, data may only be retained for a short period, exclusively for billing purposes - generally, three to six months - and then must be destroyed.

"We have serious concerns that this is treating everybody as a potential suspect in a crime," said Mr Malachy Murphy, e-rights convener with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. "This would also appear to go against the European Convention on Human Rights, which has explicit protections for citizen privacy."

Data produced by digital networks can be highly revealing, while 3G mobile phone networks, with phones which regularly broadcast their location back to the network, will provide information on where a person is standing to within a few metres. The legislation could also demand that Internet service providers store information on all the individual web pages a subscriber has visited over four years.

It is understood that Department officials failed to consult any organisation other than the Garda Síochána in preparing legislation which would in effect overturn existing EU data protection directives. The Bill would also run counter to data protection provisions within the State's E-Commerce Act 2000 - considered essential for creating a supportive e-commerce environment where businesses and consumers can trust how their private information is stored and handled.

Officials within the Department of Justice are understood to be seeking a legal regime similar to that mandated by Britain's controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act.

In Britain, aspects of RIP are being rewritten after strong opposition to the initial Act from the House of Lords, the business community, privacy advocacy groups and the British media. The British government had to withdraw additional legislation dealing with the same areas of data retention as the Irish Bill after this provoked widespread outrage and anger.

"The RIP Act was incredibly controversial when passed, but that was nothing compared to the opposition to data retention," said Mr Ian Brown, director of British policy for the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR).

"Creating a huge database that is lying there for years is a huge invitation for government misuse, much more for hackers, blackmailers, criminals and others."

Mr Brown said Britain and the Republic have been under pressure from American surveillance agencies such as the CIA and FBI to loosen protections on data privacy.

The Department of Justice did not respond to questions about the Bill's details.

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Comments (7 of 7)

concerned?

by silo

Thu Nov 28, 2002 10:26

Feel like doing something constructive about this? Something likely to raise the likelihood that this bill won't become law?

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties:

http://www.iccl.ie

[email protected]

those fucks!

by brrr...

Thu Nov 28, 2002 10:46

come around to my house knocking, asking why i criticised them on indymedia and im heading to the mountains and starting a guerrilla war. no seriously!

practical counter steps...

by Ruairi

Thu Nov 28, 2002 11:15

seems like McDowell is a student of the Bush school of genius.....

- secure free email at http://www.ziplip.com - abandon Gate's hotmail... +

some practical counter steps can be found at http://security.tao.ca

while you're there, check out the rest of the www.tao.ca site -excellant!

funny thing is: I can't even view it from work - I'm already blocked! and so it begins...

Exiting Telephone billing data storage and Mobile Phone location info

by Techie

Thu Nov 28, 2002 12:19

As far as I know, currently billing information is held for up
to 7 years, in case the bill should be challenged by the consumer.
The billing information holds the information that you see in your
detailed itemised bills.

These are who you called, when you called (date + time) and the
duration of the call.

Existing 2G mobiles, need to contact their local cell or base station
every few minutes for the simple reason, that if somebody phones you,
the system has to know what was the last cell area you were in, otherwise
it would have to potentially broadcast to every cell in the country to
link the incoming call to your phone. This would rapidly use all the
the radio capacity assigned to mobile phones, especially if you consider
for a moment, how many calls are being made at any point in time. Therefore
the logical thing to do when mobile networks were designed was to store
the mobile phone's last location, then this serves as a very good guess for
finding you and thus only the cell you are in is paged or broadcast to,
for the incoming call.

The relevance here to data security is that with existing phones, your location
for any given day and time can be pinned down to the cell that you are in.
In towns and cities, this can be as small as 1km or even a few 100 metres, while
in rural areas, where the density is lower, it can be serveral kilometres.

I am not fully aware if all of this trival low level datail is stored or not,
but it could very easily be. There is some indication that it is in other countries,
because even watching Crimewatch or any of those programs, seems to support the
argument that the Police do use this information for solving crimes etc. It would
seem reasonable that the data is of use to engineers who are always constantly looking
at traffic density and radio usage in cells so as to decide if a cell is busy enough to
be say split into two new cells or perhaps re-tune some of the system parameters.

Anyway the point is how society handles such data and as we can see, those with
access to such information, could easily determine that you were say in Cork
last Tuesday and visited Kinsale or something. The beauty of a system like this
for the 'users' of information is that in the near future if not now, this could
be tied in with speed-trap cameras or any other roadside cameras, nearly all of
which have software to read your number plate. By covering all the major roads,
a net is essentially cast over the country, through which you invariably have to pass.
So the combination of mobile-phone data and roadside camera numberplate data become
greater than the sum of the parts!

Getting back to pinning down your location, it is true that for 3G your location could
be pinned down to within a few hundred metres anywhere in the country. This can be done
with either GPS chips in the phone reporting back your location or through the use
of special software that examines the radio-signal strength from the 3 nearest base-station
antennas that your mobile can 'see' (when it communicates, even during the regular automatic
updates every few minutes). With this technique, by a process of triangulation (remember
trigonmentry from school?) your position can then be determined relatively accurately, (as above)
This 'requirement' allegedly arose due to the number of emergency calls made by people
with mobiles, who were then unable to tell the emergency services where they were and so
get the rescue services to the crash site or whatever. And so it became a requirement for
emergency services to receive this information automatically. But of course what's possible
for them is also for anyone else.

If anyone thinks that surely it is a lot of hassel to go through reams of records on the
above data it is incredibly easy and quick to do since all the information is electronic.

Finally as far as I can recall, there was a EU directive a few years ago that mandated that
all EU countries must put in a capability in every telephone exchange to allow phone calls
to be intercepted. This was brought in as part of some crime solving package. Presumably the
usual rules of warrants or whatever were to be required before any phone could be tapped.

Again however, because the intercepts can be turned on/off via software remotely, it makes it
infinitely easier to do. Presumably there are basic facilities to instruct the exchange
computer to automatically intercept all outgoing calls from the target number or perhaps
all incoming calls or any combination of the above made up of sub-lists. It is very likely
that the intercept would be able to 'copy' the call (voice) data traffic real-time and have
it routed to any other location (on the planet) if so desired. This would be trivial to do,
because a very small amount of capacity could be permanently booked on the back-bone network
for this purpose. So the issue is what are the controls, who controls, where is the independent
oversight/watchdogs, what do the public know. This is really a very big and important issue.

by Used in Veronica Geurin Case

Thu Nov 28, 2002 14:57

agree with 'Techie'.

by iosaf

Thu Nov 28, 2002 15:04

data is kept by numerous concerns.
Market research is kept for seven years.
phone bills are kept for seven years by corporation, then may be "passed on" to other commercial concerns.
This is really important to resist, the states [sic] are attempting to ´copper´fasten [sic] official access to personal data. One of the longterm effects of this will be to assist the tactical division of the people´s access to technology and information in the future.
We are currently standing at the threshold of the first Western counter-technological revolution.
Such "counter-revolutions" have occured before most notably in China, but here the idea appears to be to eradicate "free and open" "sharing" of technology (internet etc.,) and install a new global system based on credit allocation, using only licensed software and universal digitial identification tagging.
IN simple terms, "Western Civilisation" is moving quickly towards the distopic vision of every citizen counted, weighed, traced and subscribing.

We need groups of techheads and legalheads coming together to build resistance against this "technological counter-revolution" especially as we have not yet fully spread the "technological revolution" of "free/open access to information, software, media without intellectual property restrictions or licensing".

Such groups could naturally work in tandem, in sympathy, and independently to groups such as the council of liberties.
http://reclaimthemedia.org

Already groups of techheads doing something

by Phuq Hedd

Sat Nov 30, 2002 20:30

http://www.fsf.org

http://www.digitalspeech.org
http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/eubsa-swpat0202/

http://www.eff.org/privnow/

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