FW: [Apc-euroir-ws] "RIP Act" could result in massive surveillance -- BBC

[Ian G Batten]

On Thu, 06 Sep 2001, Richard Clayton wrote:
> >> The controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
> >> requires many companies providing communication services to 
> >> install technology that allows up to one in 10,000 of their 

> this was the point I raised on this list many weeks ago... that the
> consultation on s12 had some nonsense numbers in it: after doing some
> more sums I eventually concluded that current interception affects
> between 1 in 90,000 and 1 in 160,000 households.  The 1 in 10,000
> customers (per CSP) is indeed an order of magnitude out.

Although one possible counter-argument is that assuming that the per
capita number of wiretaps over the whole population is the same as the
per customer number of wiretaps over a particular ISP is possibly
flawed.  Assuming ISPs attract a homogeneous sample of the population,
or even of the ISP customer population, strikes me as quite a bold
move.  Although making the potential slew an order of magnitude seems
intuitively excessive, making the slew 1% would seem optimistic.

ian