In telecommunications, data retention refers to the, often temporary, storage of phone records and Internet traffic by commercial organizations like phone companies and ISPs. Data types and retention time differs from country to country, but all can be used for traffic analysis to create a tracking profile.

German politician Malte Spitz managed to receive six month worth of data from Germany’s largest telecommunication company Deutsche Telekom. He forwarded the information to Zeit Online, a German newspaper, which used the information to create a detailed tracking profile of the last six month of the politician.

Geolocation information were linked to Internet activities like Twitter messages or blog postings. The tracking profile uses Google Maps to display information about the politican’s location at any given time of the six month. Information about incoming and outgoing calls, SMS messages and connection to the Internet have been made available as well. It is for instance possible to determine exactly when and where calls where made, and how long they lasted.

Please note that Zeit Online is a German website which means that all texts and information are in German. you can click on the play button to see the movement on the map. The Geschwindigkeit (speed) slider can be used to decrease or increase the speed. Take note that the location can be determined to the minute.

The tracking on the map appears to be detailed enough to determine the location at any given time providing that the user is in the country.

Head over to Zeit Online to play around with the tool.

What’s your take on it? Make sure you check out Creepy! Track Michael Arrington, Or Anyone Else, Via Geolocation which can also be used to track people. (via)

The main reason is quality and experience. Usenet providers who offer bargain accounts might run into problems eventually that might lead to situations with to many users and to little resources so that the aforementioned connection and download problems appear again.

Giganews is the quality Usenet provider and I’m more than happy to pay for that quality. What I like is that you can cap your line day and night without problems no matter if it is a 16 Mbit connection or a 50 Mbit connection (if I would have access to 100 Mbit I would love to test their servers then as well). They provide a tool called Giganews Accelerator that uses compression to download newsgroup headers 6-10 times as fast. Everyone who ever downloaded more than a million pages from a group knows how long this can take without compression.

Giganews has now reached the milestone of 400 days of data retention. This means that they keep the data that gets uploaded to the Usenet for 400 days on their servers. This must be an unbelievable amount of data as upload traffic per day exceeds several Terabytes (Giganews mentioned it exceeds 5 Terabytes per day in February 2009) these days. 400 days of retention means that Giganews users can go back and search in those 400 days for data that they would like to download.

You guys know that I never advertise services on Ghacks unless I personally use and like them. Giganews is one of the few that I can recommend to anyone. They constantly improve their service and never let me down in the past.

Here is a short list of what you need to get started working with the Usenet:

• You need a Usenet Provider that is providing the access to the Usenet. I recommend Giganews but there are others out there as well.
• You need a software program to access the Usenet. I personally use the commercial Newsbin Pro client but there are free ones out there like Alt.Binz or Grabit.
• You need some good Usenet search engines. You can use these search engines to search for files that have been posted to the Usenet. Users who are interested in getting a Usenet account might want to use these search engines first to see what the Usenet has to offer.

And that’s it. There are lots of guides and tutorials out there that help Usenet newcomers. If you have any questions let me know and I try to answer them in the comments here.

Data Retention Laws (firmly pushed by the United Kingdom) are already in place which forces every European ISP to record communication data of their users. Apparently though that is not enough for the British Home Office who have plans to create a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK according to the BBC.

All for the sake of national security, fighting terrorism and crime of course. The data will be “subject to strict safeguards to ensure the right balance between privacy and protecting the public.”

Am I the only one thinking all those laws that reduce the liberty of the individual and the population are way out of proportion ? There is zero difference between some laws in Europe and the United States and some oppressive regime in the rest of the world.

I’m sorry that it got a bit political but this is an issue that is affecting everyone living in those countries.

This of course leads to the question what Mr. Mueller wants to achieve by storing every single IP connection of every single individual that uses an ISP from the United States ? Is not the whole thing a complete waste of resources and time compared to the minimal gain ? What about the protection of minors then, this should be a valid point, don’t you think ?

You can only record something that is happening in the very moment. You then need to analyze the data and come to a conclusion. Does this help the minor before the lawbreaking ? Not very likely, don’t you think ? This could only work if someone knows where to look at in this incredible heap of data. This leads of course to the fact that the data can only be used to find out what really happened. Yes, that is past tense.

The crime already happened. No way to prevent it this way.

The European Union already launched a data retention law that forces every ISP to record online activities of their customers and store the records between 6 and 24 months. The reason was again to fight terrorism.

Now some politicians hold speeches where they want to use those information for finding out about other crimes as well, not only terroristic ones. You’ve downloaded a song from emule ? You went to a website that is forbidden in the country you are living in ? Music Industry would love to have the opportunity to search the data for people who traded music over the internet.

I just want to say that I’m against crime on the internet, against terrorism, against the abuse of minors and many other things on the internet. But I’m also against stupid laws by politicians who do not understand the concept of the internet and try to justify everything that removes rights from the people with the word terrorism.

Your privacy is at stake here. Fight for it, with everything that you have.

The most interesting fact about those laws ? Guess who is paying for them.. Yeah right, you are..

Read More:

“>FBI Director wants ISPs to track users

This directive is seriously flawed for several reasons. First, the communication companies will have to pay for everything, especially storage devices, retention and transmission of data. We all know that there will be no other option than to raise prices and let the customers pay the bill.

Not all means of communication are affected. Public phone communication for example can also be saved but its not possible to know the caller. A communication between two public phones is as secure as it was before.

What if the terrorists are using proxies ? What if they buy cellphones from outside the EU and use them inside ? What if they use public internet cafes ? Wireless LAN ? Anonymous remailers ? Nothing will change.

So, what do we gain from this directive ? We may be able to find out when a terrorist communicated with someone else if he is using a device that was registered by him or if he uses his own internet connection without a proxy / encryption.

The only thing that’s sure is that the EU citizens will have to pay the bill for a directive that is flawed right from the beginning and not useful at all to counter terrorism.

If you are living in the EU let your representatives know that this directive is seriously flawed. You could also move to Norway or Switzerland for a change :)

Several countries including Great-Britain pushed and asked for such a plan to effectively fight terrorism. As a side note, makes me wonder how they want to do this “effectively”, but I leave that for another article on the subject.

I think its worth enough if the European Council will vote in favor for this law, but, and this is a big but, the beloved Creative and Media Business Alliance (aka Music Industry) tries to influence the European Council and the commission to allow this data to be used to investigate all crimes, not just serious offenses such as terrorism.

This would mean that “the entertainment industry would be able to pursue prosecutions against suspected copyright-infringes through the criminal court entirely at the cost of the taxpayer.”

Digital Rights Groups are fighting against this initiative:

“The data retention directive was proposed to fight terrorism. As ill-conceived as the original legislation was, this should never be used to fight the music and film industries’ battles at the expense of the taxpayer,” Suw Charman, executive director of the Open Rights Group.

It´s time something has to be done against this never satisfied industry in my opinion, and the only working method is to boycott everything that is sold by the big players in music biz.

Update: Things have not changed a lot in the past six years. Hollywood and the music industry are still pushing and lobbying hard to get new rules and laws in their favor. The most recent attempts were SOPA and PIPA in the united States.