[LINK] Australia the idiot in the global village, says Geoff Huston

Bernard Robertson-Dunn brd at iimetro.com.au
Thu Sep 3 12:44:07 AEST 2015


Australia the idiot in the global village, says Geoff Huston
Net luminary unloads on data retention
The Register
2 Sep 2015 at 23:30, Richard Chirgwin
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/02/australia_the_idiot_in_the_global_village_says_geoff_huston/

One of the individuals who first brought the Internet to Australia, 
Geoff Huston, has unloaded on the federal government's chaotic attempt 
to introduce its data retention regime.

Now chief scientist at APNIC, Huston has written in his Potaroo blog 
that one of the key assumptions behind the data retention regime, a 
stable mapping of IP addresses to endpoints, is pretty much obsolete in 
a world of exhausted IPv4 addresses.

“We are trying as hard as we can to retain the role of Global Village 
Idiot,” Huston writes, because in spite of repeated assertions that Web 
browsing history won't be retained, that's the near-certain outcome of 
data retention.

He wrote: “the Australian Data Retention Laws say something has to be 
stored, and the bureaucrats running the Attorney General's Office of 
Data Retention say something has to be stored, and the industry players 
are trying to understand what exactly should be stored, because in 
shared address-based networks there is nothing around that meets the 
intended requirements of this law.”

The problem Huston believes will lead to storage far beyond the mandate 
of the law is that (apart from the relatively small number of people who 
shell out for a fixed IP address) the account-to-IP mapping is recorded 
in only one place: the carrier-grade NAT's logs.

“Every transaction generates a new NAT binding, and that NAT binding 
generates a log entry. So every DNS query, every part of every web page, 
every individual email collected by your device - in short, each and 
every individual network transaction - will generate a CGN log entry. 
This is no less than your entire Web browsing history, your DNS query 
history, and the history of everything else you are doing on the net.”

The reason, he suspects, is simple cluelessness: nobody in parliament 
nor among the various departmental heads that demanded data retention 
understands how the networks operate: "They just don’t get it", he states.

At least such a large data trove will be unlikely to fit on a USB key. A 
reference to "Brandis' metadata retention recipe doesn't prohibit USB 
drives stored in a garden shed
Guidance to carriers says crypto's a must, but storage and physical 
security details scanty"
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/13/attorneygeneral_wont_rule_out_metadata_stored_on_usb_drive_in_a_shed/> 
®

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
email: brd at iimetro.com.au
web:   www.drbrd.com
web:   www.problemsfirst.com
Blog:  www.problemsfirst.com/blog




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