Hi Raju, On Nov 14, 2007 3:20 AM, Raj Mathur <raju@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The mail addresses can only be stored if the server through which the > mail is relayed (or on which it originates) falls under the law. I'd > presume that's not a significant percentage of all mails sent out from > any country. > (a) (as you say) they can of course be trivially extracted from the traffic flow at the provider level. cf the current EFF / NSA / San Francisco case - that (as I understand it) is probably in breach of the US Constitution, yet it happened/is happening. The German law, and similar laws in the UK and other countries, implicitly (at least) enables such tactics; (b) most mail users use mail servers at their employers or their local ISP (ISPs with retail presence in multiple territories will of course have mail servers in situated locally); (c) the balance, excluding those weirdos running their own personal MTA / MSAs, will be using webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail. Tracerouting from the machine I'm typing this on (in the UK) shows a route through my ISP, to LINX (the London IX), and then straight into Google space. The RTT all the way to the final hop is in the 30ms range: [...] 8 209.85.248.80 (209.85.248.80) 25.302 ms 24.348 ms 25.605 ms MPLS Label 548800 TTL=1 9 209.85.248.79 (209.85.248.79) 27.972 ms 36.281 ms 26.562 ms 10 72.14.233.77 (72.14.233.77) 28.266 ms 29.057 ms 27.273 ms 11 66.249.94.146 (66.249.94.146) 29.517 ms 30.668 ms 30.179 ms 12 ik-in-f19.google.com (66.249.91.19) 28.092 ms 27.926 ms 28.564 ms ...which strongly suggests to me that the front-end Gmail webserver my "mail" hits is probably pretty close to me. It's certainly not on the other side of the Atlantic. There's quite a lot of cooperation between EU member states, would a "UKUSA"-type arrangement in the EU be very surprising? =i On Nov 14, 2007 3:20 AM, Raj Mathur <raju@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tuesday 13 November 2007 15:29, Florian Echtler wrote: > > [snip] > > As a native German speaker, allow me to clarify: with respect to IP > > communication, the law mandates saving the following information for > > 6 months: > > > > - which customer was assigned which IP for what timespan > > - sender mail address, receiver mail address and sender IP for each > > mail - in case of VOIP: caller and callee phone number and IP address > > The mail addresses can only be stored if the server through which the > mail is relayed (or on which it originates) falls under the law. I'd > presume that's not a significant percentage of all mails sent out from > any country. > > Of course, it's also possible to track (snoop) all SMTP traffic on the > network, but that's totally different from just keeping mail and AAA > server logs and from my understanding that's not what this law > mandates. > > Regards, > > -- Raju > -- > Raj Mathur raju@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://kandalaya.org/ > Freedom in Technology & Software || February 2008 || http://freed.in/ > GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F > PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves > -- And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke? - Syd Barrett
