Reply to post: Re: Why are the ISPs making such a fuss?

UK citizens will have to pay government to spy on them

Drefsab_UK

Re: Why are the ISPs making such a fuss?

If all they will have to record is a url and an IP address as you mentioned, that would not be quite so hard but that would still be harder than you imagine. You need to do packet filtering for each customer, because they don't want just your browsing history. You will need to identify from each TCP packet does it contain information that is wanted then either record it or ignore it.

If you visit 1 website, there will be DNS calls (if not cached and not always to the ISP's DNS server), there will be often many separate calls for images, html, php, js, css and so on for each component of the web site. Often these sites are not hosting everything on one domain so there’s all the cross domain call's and their subsequent DNS lookup’s. You then have multiple protocol’s in the mix between HTTP and HTTPS. All of this is probably going to be going on for a simple site, when you hit bigger sites it gets more complicated with all the ad networks, embedded media, services on none standard ports etc.

So to filter from all of that to get just the simple data you mentioned is a task in itself, and we have only looked at a simple web visit.

One of the main problems is the bill does not outline technical specifics but does give the intent that they want the data to be useful to them and they want the lovely vague term of metadata.

When you look at what is needed to be recorded to retain useful data for ALL communication, not just web browsing, but dns, email, irc, instant messaging, online gaming, IPv4 and IPv6, VPN’s etc you are looking an incredibly complicated task that will generate a LOT of data.

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