Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Though network operators say that movement patterns are not yet acquired
comprehensively, and that they delete the connection data after 80 days at the
latest, we don't know what copy is meant. Once gathered without the users'
consent, this type of data remains available forever. If what the Swiss paper
Son-
ntagszeitung
once wrote is true, then the Swiss police logged the movements of
about one million cell phone users over a half-year period. In the name of the
fight against terror, this type of data acquisition is likely to be legally enforced
in Europe. The discussion about the technical feasibility has already begun.
Within the scope of so-called
locally based services
(
LBS
) of cell phone
providers, the business world even wishes for an exact location finding of all
users to be able to inform them of their special offers in time. Since October 1,
2001, a law in the USA requires providers to locate each handset two-thirds of
the time to a 125-m accuracy. Data privacy laws in the USA are less restrictive
than they are in Europe in general: if you give your personal data to a merchant
(e.g., when acquiring a customer card), then the merchant owns your data, and
he can sell it or do whatever he deems fit.
With the technical means available today and in the near future, you can collect
incredible amounts of interesting information easily to keep 'in stock'. At the
appropriate time (when the person concerned becomes of interest or falls out
of favor for some reason or other), 'one' can fall back on it. Research work on
national intelligence agencies showed that this takes only little personnel cost.
It is estimated to amount to a few dozen or hundred employees per country.
Imagine an investigator telling you where you had been at a certain time after
many years. You don't even remember yourself, and threw out your appoint-
ment topic years ago. Greetings from Orwell.
You think this is gray theory? The text of the Telecommunications Surveil-
lance Directive (Fernmeldeverkehr- Uberwachungs-Verordnung; F UV) of May
18, 1995, valid in Germany, is primarily about traffic analysis of monitored sub-
scriber lines (including cell phones). However, considering the large variety of
information to be supplied, the text suggests that authorized government agen-
cies have access to connection details, too. There is currently a fierce dispute
about the passing on of position-finding information to government agencies.
There is more evidence on the evaluation of the phone traffic mentioned above.
In 1997, a reference application of a supercomputer concerned the so-called
call records analysis
in the telecommunications area, which is nothing but traf-
fic analysis. More specifically, it relates to two Sun Ultrasparc 10000s with
64 processors each and a total disk capacity of 8.5 Tbytes (i.e., 8500 Gbytes)
