Re: Disturbing news...

["Robert J. Hansen" <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

> Like to see who they want to get to pay for all that
> storage!

Why, you of course, Mike.  If the government is dead-set on making it
happen, it will do what needs to be done in order to do it--which means
giving financial help to "cooperating, patriotic" ISPs, and paying for
this by raising taxes on you.  Or, alternately, the ISPs can pay for it
by passing the costs on to you.  Either way, you pay for it.

...

They need enough HD storage for, say, a month, and at the end of the
month they compress down the data and burn it to a CD-R.  If that sort
of storage were to all be kept live, then yes, there'd be a significant
storage problem.  But Europol isn't asking for copies of all files
downloaded--just email traffic, addresses of websites visited,
credit-card numbers, etc.  Assuming the average user racks up 2mb a day
of needs-to-be-collected data a day (wildly overestimated), that's still
only 60mb/mo.  Assume compression can crunch the text emails, text web
addressed, etc., down to 30mb/mo.  Now you can store 20 person-months of
needs-to-be-collected traffic on a single CD-R.

If you're a large ISP with 100,000 customers, you need 5,000 CD-Rs a
month to comply with regulations.  Multiply that by 60 and you get
300,000 CD-Rs to comply with the 5-year limit.  That's well within the
realm of automated CD-R backup systems.

300,000 CD-Rs, in bulk, will cost about $30,000 US.  Not too bad.  The
dedicated automated CD-R backup system, a couple of million USD.  Say
that, between manpower, retooling and new purchases, it'll be five
million USD to comply with the new regulations.  Say that Management
demands it be paid for in five years.  You need to jack prices enough to
give you an extra $1 million a year, spread over 100,000 users... if you
raise every user's price by $1 a month, you've got it made.

What Europol is demanding is definitely feasible.  Whether or not it's
_wise_ is an entirely different matter.