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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

"File this" 

From Christopher Null's The Working Guy tech blog for April 6, 2009:
In a move that even the most nonchalant of privacy advocates is crying foul over, the UK has put into effect a European Union directive which mandates the archival of information regarding virtually all internet traffic for the next 12 months. The program formally went into effect Monday [April 5].

The data retention rules require the archival of all email traffic (the identities of the sender and receiver, but not the contents of the messages), records of VOIP telephone calls (traditional phone calls are already monitored), and information about every website visited by any computer user in the country. [...] That data will then be accessible -- to fight "crime and terrorism," of course -- by "hundreds of public bodies" to investigate whatever crimes they see fit. [...]

Privacy concerns aside, another issue becomes one of how exactly to manage all this data. A report dating back to 2004 estimated that a single, large ISP in the UK would need up to 40 million gigabytes of storage capacity to store the traffic data from a year of user activity. Even in 2009, that kind of storage doesn't come cheap, nor does the challenge of managing it all come easy.
Springing forward with devious ingenuity from this, loyal citizen Saul Resnikoff speculates on how this might work in Alpha Complex:

"Since Computer use is out of the question, someone in CPU decides to print out all the data and file it. The Troubleshooters are responsible for securing the destination file storage location and making sure it's free from any dangers, and of course large enough to hold all the printouts. The expected size of the accumulation is, of course, beyond their security clearance. The Troubleshooters must also gather the printouts from all the various printers that are churning them out, and then alphabetize them all, without of course looking at them as the vast majority are beyond their security clearance.

"What could go wrong?"
Posted by: Allen Varney / 6:52 PM

Comments:
"What could wrong?"

Everything and the kitchen sink--if I know "Paranoia" sessions!
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : April 24, 2009 5:28 PM
 
"whatever crimes they see fit"

Remember this is the country where CCTV is used to catch perpetrators of such serious crimes as benefit fraud and dog fouling...
# posted by Anonymous Zild : April 26, 2009 5:59 PM
 
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