True necessity of Records? [was: CryptoSeal]

[Dan White]

On 10/24/13 14:57 -0400, grarpamp wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 1:53 PM, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> this had the convenient effect of masking the origin of a caller
>> through our network.  needless to say, we were strongly encouraged to
>> keep all CDR records for years, precisely because some many months
>> later a request would come in asking for the calling party information
>> associated with one of these outbound legs.
>
>And per the topic... what was the positive/negative effect in cases where
>that data wasn't available for a request? Who did the encouragement?
>Why? And what stick did they wield? Were such requests even legal
>court orders?

For the small Telco I work for, there are a few scenarios where we "give
up" information:

* Customer billing dispute, in which case we'll provide or confirm
information that a customer already has printed on their bill, perhaps in
more detail if available.

* Trap and trace. This is triggered by a customer entering a star
code on their POTS phone, which stores the caller information (even if the
caller attempted to block their information) of the last call only, on the
switch for later retrieval. That information is only provided to local law
enforcement, and they only ask for it when a customer files a police report
(harassment).

* We have provided CDR information to a court when subpoenaed. This was not
completely information, since we only store CDR records of calls which
cross tolls trunks (calls which leave our switch). Local on-switch calls are not
billable, so we don't bother to store them. I assume this is standard policy
for other small ILECs.

We have never negotiated what information we provide to local authorities,
and have never been encouraged or ordered to keep X number of days of data.

The same goes for the ISP (broadband) side of the house. We've been
subpoenaed for information about who used what IP and when. We keep syslog
data for up to two months, for our own trouble shooting use.

-- 
Dan White