At 18:57 21/06/2002 -0700, John Young wrote:
Data retention is being done now by programs and services which cache data to ease loading on servers and networks. [...]
John, As a systems administrator @ an ISP, I can tell flat out that the software you describe has nothing to do with ISP services. The software provides caching services for telecom companies (ie. billing, WAP, voice mail alerts etc). I see nothing that mentions typical ISP services, like e-mail or web-browsing. It is software designed to impress the executive level with pie charts and promises of reduced hardware costs. No one likes spending $50k on a NAS or Fibre Channel / RAID 10 box. Next time John, I suggest you turn your sites on caching software like Squid. Know what? I'm not even afraid to provide the URL! http://www.squid-cache.org .. you may even discover it has US Intelligence Community(tm) links, dating back many years! Incredible, huh? ISP's like the one I work for use Squid to save on bandwidth costs by caching oft-visited websites. Unfortunately, we (like most if not all ISP's) cannot afford the massive disk arrays (or the space they would take up, even the electricity) that would be necessary to retain data *for one day*. Geez, I don't think the government gonna like that. That's doesn't even bring us to the technical abilities of all the different pieces of software that must be re-written (en masse) to satisfy government desires. For instance, let's try e-mail software.. There are numerous companies and individuals who offer their own versions of e-mail server software. Microsoft's Exchange and Ipswitch's IMail for the Windows crowd who like spending lots of money, or Qmail, Postfix, Exim and even Sendmail for the Unix crowd. There are dozen's more, but you get the point. All that software will need to be rewritten. Then all the e-mail servers will need to be upgraded and tested. THEN more disk space added just to handle all the extraneous information like from who and to, from where (say originating IP and from what server host and IP) etc etc etc ad nauseam. Whoops! Let's not forget tape backups! I'm buying 3M stock come Monday! But what happens if we have a disk failure and the logs are lost? Hmm... Anyway, that is just for e-mail.. Imagine what HTTP, or FTP, or whatever can't-live-without service someone invents in the future? Data retention is unworkable even to the biggest of companies. Even the NSA cannot store that kind of data without a significant (and secret) budget. The only ones deriving any benefit from this are law enforcement and computer hardware & commercial software manufacturers. Maybe its an economic stimulus package in disguise? -- Steve.