20090101 (log data)

[Hans S.]

-------- Original Message --------
From: Marco Gruss <kork at kork.dyndns.org>
Apparently from: owner-or-talk at freehaven.net
To: or-talk at freehaven.net
Subject: Re: 20090101 (log data)
Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:27:39 +0100

> Hi,
> 
> TOR Admin (gpfTOR1) wrote:
> > I will try it for email (fon, mobile and sms may be nearly like this):
> For mobile calls and SMS messages, the cell location of the caller/
> sender at the beginning of the call must be recorded.
> 
> Pretty ugly, IMHO.
> 
> Marco

Hi,

the big, but yet not loud enough protests in Germany about these "new"
laws do imho  relate to the fact that there are much older laws. These
protected exactly against the use of grids of databases concerning citizens,
the obligation to deliver data to authorities and to  to create grids with
for good reasons separate data for authorities.  So the big "They" create new
laws explicitely enforcing what was prohibited yesterday.
 How successfull or actually working that was in daily life is another
 question.

Deep trust in promotional and mass manipulating abilities make me believe
that in a not too far future all these doings may be socially anticipated
by the majority and accepted as necessary.  Reasons? The usual.
Paedorists.

To my knowledge not all (or only few) of states have or ever had this
'limited ability' in treating their citizens data. Of course there also
are a few with a higher valency of human rights.

There is a background to what has happened in DE right now, also
concerning our friends from Suomi (hope that's right) as well as people
(friends, too, of course;) from Italy and presently 48 other States.

The bigger picture appears to be the so called "Convention on Cybercrime",
which our beloved goverment (DE) wishes to ratify.

Please take a look at:

(0) The Treaty (choose #185), english, french 
(1) The list of states involved, english 
(2) Is where I found (1), german.  
(3) Foebud's website, german

As obvious and natural members of a Council of Europe, the US, Japan,
Azerbaijan, Turkey, South-Africa and others are also supposed to, are
about to, or already have ratified the mentioned paper.  Moving servers to
Russia ?  See list.  (although the Russians didn't even care to sign it,
yet ...)

The treaty (0) is concerned about what they call mutual  assisstance
in fighting computer related crime and the usual paedorist stuff. 
The treaty itself is absolutely horrifying and has effects much further than
Germany and Europe, reaching out to the US and elsewhere. Article
20 and 21 are interesting, they might be the reason for our law. The
german gov.  and others simply shift the costs of getting and storing data
essential for the intended surveillance.  According to the treaty the
goverments are obliged to somehow get hold of tha data.  So they make a
law forcing isp's and other service providers to do so. Awfully simple.

Read  Article 23 and further about international co-operation agreements.
According to this, telco data can and shall be made available to
authorities of the enlisted states on request and spontanously for the
purpose of criminal investigation.  Hurray.

So far, so bad, but even worse,  data then will leave the originating
legislation.  Of course will, lets say the Ukrainian police obey e.g
german law how long to store and how to use or where to pass data to. (I
do not have any problems with or about Ukrania or Ukranians, just an
example.) So, what happens, if data becomes to be very easily available to
states who never really cared about such odd things like civil rights?
Welcome to an international legal marketplace for telco data.

With a little phantasy we might imagine yottabytes (really much) of logs
being analyzed by whoever wants to, profiling of individuals and tracking
just about anything in communication, and this on a pretty much
international scale. Every day.  Is that new? No, but new in that extent.

Some people might end up in Guantanamo or some other weirdo's prison
without ever knowing what actually hit them. Nowadays mere suspicion is
enough, we have learned.

Quite a nightmare.

As soon as this law in Germany comes into force on 01.01.2009 Tor-ops
_may_ have to hand over logs on request.  It does not criminalize
operators of a node.

Tor's purpose is to provide anonymous access to the net. Period.  So how
much this analyzing of nodes will break anonymity is the interesting
part...

I personally begin to look around for places to set up my node (and
myself;) in other parts of the world.


Suggestions are welcome.



Regards

Hans


(0)http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/ListeTraites.asp?CM=8&CL=ENG
(1)http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/ChercheSig.asp?NT=185&CM=&DF=&CL=ENG
(2)http://www.tecchannel.de/pc_mobile/news/1738342/ 
(3)http://www.foebud.org/datenschutz-buergerrechte/vorratsdatenspeicherung/weitergabe-von-kommunikationsprofilen