[CLUG] How big is your /var ?

[Ronan Kirby]

Mark,

First of all it would seem, after note from someone on another list and a 
quick read of the actual bill[1], that for now this only applies to fax 
and phone/mobile communication.

> The bulk of the records mentioned are held onto by financial institutions, 
> telco providers and so on, anyway and for a lot longer than this law 
> stipulates.

Yeup, in a lot of cases this is true.

> US law alone has a lot of US mutli-nationals nearly holding on 
> to the contents of employees waste paper baskets, regardless of what country 
> the employee is located (Thanks to Enron and Worldcom for that.)

Indeed - Sarbanes-Oxley has meat many changes in lots of companies 
world wide. I work for a US company and it's something I hear mentioned daily.

However, not every company is a US subsidiary or multinational financial 
organization. Not every company chooses to keep communication records on a 
voluntary basis for such lengthy periods of time (i.e. 3+ years). In fact, 
it may surprise you to know that more Irish companies are *not* the afore 
mentioned ;-P

My issue here is with "the little guy", where little is relative and 
therefor covers nearly all Irish owned communications companies. Putting a 
legal onus on a company to store 3 years of logs can, in many cases, be 
crippling. When it comes to pass that this applies in a broader manner than 
just fax / phone / mobile, depending on the level of logging required, the 
resulting logs can be massive. Imagine a mail system pushing 500,000+ mails 
a day along with, say, a busy cache/proxy, plus potentially a good healthy 
web server (depending on the wording of the bill) - your talking about 
massive amounts of data. Asking typical Irish comms companies to store 
this is unreasonable. Not to mention the strain on company resources when 
Harcourt St /request/ nicely parsed and presented audited logs. I just 
don't think this kind of law takes in to consideration the size and 
resources of your average Irish company. I can only imagine what our 
emerging communications companies would have turned out like had something 
like this existed in the early 90's. Your right in that this doesn't 
really matter to the big companies, I'm not worried about them, it's our 
local industry that stands to loose here in the long run.

One doesn't have to look far away to see how this can grow and grow.

> There's nothing inherently evil about record retention, it only starts 

Depends what story of that high-rise your looking at it from ;-) Though 
ironically, I'm currently on the 32nd floor while typing this, but very 
definitely looking at it from the ground LOL.

FWIW - I'm purposely not getting in to or expressing an opinion either way 
on the Civil Liberties aspects of this.

- Ronan

[1] http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/bills28/bills/2002/4602/b46c02d.pdf