Seems like no matter where you look anymore, slashdot, digg, the register, cnet, etc, you will come across stories about governments, or large organizations, pushing for data retention.
On the law enforcement side of things, you have the authorities trying to make ISP’s doing their job for them with unrealistic legislation that will force them to do long term data retention.
Case:
FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited
The FBI wants all ISP’s to keep a log of every website every one of their customers visits, for two years.
Now lets do a little math magic here.
The domain name “http://www.lordnova.com” is 23 bytes. A infinitesimal amount of data, lets just use that as
the average domain name length.
Now, we will have to assume here, but I imagine the log kept would look something like this.
timestamp ipaddress domain name
1265418112 200.50.50.50 http://www.lordnova.com
That one log entry comes out to 47 bytes.
So, with 1 Megabyte being 1,048,576 bytes, it only takes about 22,300 visited domain names to reach a megabyte.
22.8 million visited domain names, would make a gigabyte. 23.3 billion to make a terabyte.
Now, according to estimates in 2009, in the US, there are about 228 million internet users. If each of them visits 100 domain names a day, collectively, that would take up approximately 997 gigabytes of log files. Each day. Now, this is divided up between numerous ISP’s in the United States.
Still, each month, that would be 29 terabytes of log files.
Each year, 350 terabytes.
So, 700 terabytes of log files over a 2 year period.
Now, that does not take into account new internet users over that time period, or people who visit more than 100 sites a day.
On a typical day, I visit approximately 500 pages, more on the weekends.
Now, this is all assuming they just want is the main domain name. as the article says
What remains unclear are the details of what the FBI is proposing. The possibilities include requiring an Internet provider to log the Internet protocol (IP) address of a Web site visited, or the domain name such as cnet.com, a host name such as news.cnet.com, or the actual URL such as
http://reviews.cnet.com/Music/2001-6450_7-0.html.
They might want a much longer address.
Now, I have two problems with this.
First, I am getting really fed up with the whole “think of the children” banner every group and agency uses when they want to pass legislation that most people would look at and shake their heads at. But once you throw it under the umbrella of “for the children” who is going to vote against it?
Second, in all the stories I have seen like this, and there are a lot of them, not once does the Agency that is trying to get it passed say they will foot the bill.
The storage alone would cost a pretty penny. Not to mention the servers, the space, the power, the cooling, the maintenance, and all the work it would take to put a system like that into place. Its almost as if they expect the ISP’s to do their job for them, and foot the bill for it.