Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
and 56-Gbyte memory. A Sun representative argued that this gigantic hard-
ware deployment was required, for example, to grant discounts for preferred
phone numbers. Well, businesses seem to do everything to keep their customers
happy. By the way, this is possible thanks to the thorough digitalization of the
telephone network.
Similar computers were produced by other manufacturers, including DEC, SGI,
IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. And we are talking only of the civilian area here.
The NCR corporation shipped a
data-warehouse
application to Mannesmann;
that's a huge database with a capacity of about 1.2 Tbytes [InfWeek]. To my
knowledge, the biggest data warehouse with a data capacity of 24 Tbytes is
in use at Wal-Mart. How these data are evaluated is not disclosed, 'because
data warehousing allows you to be very close to the core of corporate strategy'
[InfWeek]. It is less likely to know whether or not a national intelligence agency
is granted access.
The bad thing about traffic analysis is that we cannot prevent it. Schwartz and
Wood recommend the 'ethical use' of such algorithms. No comment. Also, so-
called
mix servers
that anonymize Web access and have been used successfully
(see
anon.inf.tu-dresden.de
) catch only a small part of our broad data
trace and are hardly used, compared with the usual Web traffic. Meanwhile, it
is believed that mix servers supply all data upon the request of investigative
agencies.
Noticed something about the years mentioned? Everything is history! Today,
in the name of the fight against terror, data about us that accrue somehow
somewhere are openly requested to be made available. Including in Germany,
the homeland of data privacy. The technical possibilities have greatly evolved,
and meanwhile people have started to publicly become aware of the problem.
I ask myself whether it isn't already too late. Read about the megalomaniac
project named 'Information Awareness Office' (
IAO
) in Wikipedia (and is
included on the Web site under
txt/policy/Information Awareness Office.html
).
You will be amazed just how hungry for data they all are out there. This project,
formerly called
TIA
(Total Information Awareness) and probably going by the
name of
Tangram
in the near future, tries to acquire simply everything about
all citizens of all countries to (initially) support the fight against terrorism.
Topic Analysis
Traffic analysis is still a current topic, but there are meanwhile much better
surveillance methods. Traffic is out, topic is in — contents are already being
