This is a presentation that I gave to the ISPA Parliamentary Advisory Forum on 10th January 2006. The Forum was on the topic of the EU Data Retention Directive, and other speakers were Charles Clarke (Home Secretary), Jim Gamble (Deputy Director of the National Crime Squad), and Emeric Miszti (Security and AUP Officer for Tiscali).
My original presentation was done using Powerpoint slides but no other notes. I've reproduced the slides here as a sequence of boxes, and added both what I can recall saying and [in brackets] some glosses. All my careful slide animations went wrong on the night, so I haven't bothered trying to reproduce them here.
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This is me. I haven't bothered with an affiliation as no doubt my comments will be disowned by everyone. | |||||||
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My job title is "Internet Expert", but sometimes I think it should be "Professional Nit-Picker". So here are some nits in the Directive. | |||||||
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What we were afraid of was having to log every single IP packet header, which is what some drafts appeared to be asking for. | |||||||
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Is a University covered? They have a lot more users than West Dorset Internet. Last time I stayed at the City Hotel they provided me with Internet access. Are they covered? There's wireless Internet on the trains. [Molly's transport café was made up, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that transport cafés offer Internet.] | |||||||
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Do we have to log use of MSN, or attempt to detect access to Skype? If we run a multi-player game that lets people talk to each other, do we have to log who talked to whom? | |||||||
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IP addresses are allocated to users, not communications. Would the Commission like a copy of "Beginner's Guide to TCP/IP"?
A certain time zone - which one? Brussels? Ulan Bator? If they meant "date and time including the time zone", why not say so? | |||||||
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I looked at the logs for today for my own laptop. It logged-in and -out at midnight, five past midnight, ten past, quarter past, ... because it connects to the POP3 server every few minutes to check for mail. If they wanted the date and time that e-mails were sent or collected, why not ask for it? | |||||||
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I had a look at who I received e-mail from today. Jim [Gamble], I hear the Barrister may be able to help you with your budget problems. On the other hand, perhaps the Commission were cleverer than we think if they don't want to look through this lot. | |||||||
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At least it wasn't 7 years. | |||||||
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Thankfully I don't have to set up special security arrangements or high-reliability systems for keeping this data. I'm afraid that means the data won't be useful as evidence, but our systems make mistakes. | |||||||
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While I was preparing this presentation I found a letter containing these words. [The author of the letter was present, but I won't mention his name here.] So I was glad to read ... | |||||||
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This presentation was reported by ZDNet.