True necessity of Records? [was: CryptoSeal]

[Bill Stewart]

At 08:14 PM 10/24/2013, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>I got the same response from talking to techies at a large telco, they kept
>the records just in case they needed them (not for any specific LEO use, but
>just in case they needed the info at some point in the future), and because it
>was easier to keep them than to delete them.

Back when my wife and I were in college, the US had one main telco, 
the Bell System.
There were always lawsuits against them about one thing and another,
billing disputes, anti-trust accusations, telephone poles jumping in 
front of cars,
state public utility commission squabbles of one sort or another, etc.
She had a summer job one year translating a chunk of telco billing data
from a homebrew database into a commercial DBMS format just in case 
they needed it.
Seven years later it was no longer lawsuit bait,
and the commercial DBMS format was no longer supportable on any 
current computers either :-)
(Which was a bit of a surprise, since I think it was an IBM DBMS.)