UDP and data retention

Sven Anderson sven at anderson.de
Fri Dec 19 15:38:30 UTC 2008


Am 19.12.2008 um 14:32 schrieb Sven Anderson:
>
> Am 19.12.2008 um 11:24 schrieb Eugen Leitl:
>
>> This is off-topic, but isn't UDP making data retention more difficult
>> than TCP/IP.
>
> Since you seem to talk about Germany: Again, data retention does and  
> will not happen on a per-packet basis and especially not on the  
> transport layer (TCP/UDP) with the current law. There will "only" be  
> records which dynamic IP-address was assigned to which customer at  
> which time. That's it. See Paragraph 4 in [1] (German).
>
> [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung#Verkehrsdatenspeicherung

I should add that anonymizing services, as far as the law can be  
applied to them, only have to record the mapping of data replacements,  
but _only_ for data that has to be recorded by another party anyways.  
This is only true for IP adresses in case of Tor (not so for email  
anonymizers). So, port numbers and the like are never allowed to be  
recorded by anonymizing services regarding data retention law, since  
port numbers are also not allowed to be recorded by the internet  
access providers or any other party.

Beside that, the data retention law does only apply to services in  
return for payments ("in der Regel gegen Entgelt erbrachte Dienste").  
Since Tor is a completely free service (no payments, no ads), it is  
very likely that Tor operators are not allowed to store _any_ data.

In any case, UDP or TCP makes no difference.

Beside the data retention, there is also the "normal" lawful  
interception in case of a probable cause. But in this case there are  
no restrictions what to record, AFAIK. So I don't see why UDP would be  
more of a problem for them.

Sven

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