On Sun, Jul 04, 2004 at 10:06:01PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 09:23:08PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

...

Amongst the earliers RAMs were tubes of mercury with a pulse-generator at one end and a microphone at the other. The speed of sound provided the delay, the system required regeneration, like modern DRAMs.

At GBit WAN stores a whole packet in the fibre as optical delay line, with 10 GBit it's true even for a LAN (some 30 bits/m).

That interpretation techically allows to wiretap anything.

You guys miss the point... you don't have to deal with stretched examples of wires as storage devices ... I doubt there is a single router or switch which does not clock incoming packets into various intermediate storage registers, stuff them temporarily into RAM and/or FIFOs, and otherwise store traffic. Nobody builds flow through asynchronous systems of that complexity, if for no other reason than that outgoing traffic has to be queued for delivery. In fact virtually every networking technology and virtually every digital telephone technology stores the stream of samples, packets, vocoder frames and so forth internally for various lengths of time, often up to many seconds under the right circumstances. And essentially every design for a digital interface on the planet clocks bits one by one into holding flip flops, so viewed at the nanosecond clock tick by clock tick level the data is sitting there in storage even for devices that don't store whole packets, frames or messages. Shut off the clock and the data will sit there forever (plus or minus dynamic refresh issues). Thus unless the law changes, you are quite right - wiretapping virtually anything in digital format - at least by copying it from a storage device such as a latch inside the communications equipment that properly carries the traffic - is perfectly legal without exception under this absurd ruling. -- Dave Emery N1PRE, die@dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493