Why the new wire tapping law is a lot worse than you think

http://www.slate.com/id/2194254/

by smanek • 18 years ago

17 5 18 years ago

narag• 18 years ago

It seems that Sweden has just approved a similar rogue law: http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/2008/06/invasion-of-...

Stabback• 18 years ago

Please no, I joined YC to get away from the politics that have taken over reddit and Digg. I like this place for it's tech and entrepreneurship news, not these stories.

smanek2• 18 years ago

Sorry, normally I'd agree with you but this is about laws regarding the internet (routing protocols, telecoms, etc).

I think that understanding the laws pertaining to the medium most YC businesses run on, i.e., the internet, is relevant to this forum.

To my mind, this is just as relevant to web-entrepreneurs as new federal road laws are to trucking-entrepreneurs.

jules• 18 years ago

Netherlands: ~1700 taps per day

US: 2208 taps per YEAR

Netherlands: 16,570,613 citizens

US: 301,139,947 citizens

Baffling? It gets worse.

Recently a new EU law forces phone & internet providers to save phone & internet data (12 months in the Netherlands, the minimum according to the EU law is 6 months). This means that every time you visit a website your provider stores this fact in a database. Every time you send an email message this is recorded.

It gets worse though.

Every time you make a phone call it's saved in a database (not what you say, only that you made a phone call). Now the interesting part: if you use a mobile phone your location is saved too. So the government knows where you are if you use your mobile phone. Maybe they know where you are if your phone is on even if you're not using it.

Someone might say "OK, they have this database of every citizen, but they aren't going to track everyone." The budget for this project in the Netherlands is 20 million per year. But the government doesn't pay for the servers and other things necessary to save this data directly. The phone & internet companies do, and the government pays them a small amount of money every time they access their database. Accessing the database costs 6.50 euros. They pay 13 euros to the phone company for a tap. That means that they are going to access the database 20M/6.5 (just over 3 million) times. Or maybe 1.5 million wire taps per year! This is huge, especially considering the small population of the Netherlands.

So they know (if they don't use a wire tap) 1. what you do on the internet and 2. whom you're calling 3. where you were for the last 12 months.

Who's going to make sure that the data is well protected? The phone & internet companies (hint: that's not going to work).

Why are they doing this? To catch terrorists. Of course terrorists don't use hotmail (if you use hotmail they can't see whom you are emailing). Terrosists probably don't use proxies either. And terrorists don't know that they can use Skype instead of a phone.

Be happy, it's worse here.

smanek2• 18 years ago

Your numbers are misleading since they only count wiretaps with warrants, and one wiretap in America averages several thousand intercepted communications. 'Presidential Secrecy and the Law' (Pallitto and Weaver) says that by conservative estimates ~3 million communications are tapped per year.

And that's only wire taps with warrants. The EFF estimates that several billion more communications were illegally tapped with the whole ATT/NSA debacle.

Not to mention they gave the government unfettered and illegal access to their 'Hawkeye' (records of all phone calls in the last 7 years) and 'Aurora' (stores thousands of terabytes of 'interesting' IP packets from the last 5 years) databases.

Why the new wire tapping law is a lot worse than you think

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