Cost of traffic data access?

[Roland Perry]

In article <4C671243.8080001 at zen.co.uk>, Peter Fairbrother 
<zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk> writes

>>>> Roland, do you have even a very rough range for the cost? Thanks,
>>>
>>> There are perhaps two extremes punted around long ago, where it's 
>>>been  alleged some reverse-DQ requests cost £100 each, versus some 
>>>requesters only prepared to pay £15/hr for proven effort sorting out 
>>>the answers. But where we are today, I don't know.
>>>
>>  £15 a hour wouldn't even represent cost recovery of salary, let 
>>alone  overheads, for ANY engineer I've employed in the last 10 years. 
>>A  realistic minimum charge would be in the order of £35/hour just on 
>>a  cost recovery basis for low level engineering staff extending to 
>>£100/hour for senior staff on the same basis.
>>  As to the particular data Peter is asking about NO sane ISP keeps 
>>those  records,
>
>I thought that it was part of the voluntary data retention programme to 
>keep that data for 4 days?

That was entirely aimed at keeping data you already had - in particular 
the web proxy logs. 4 days was chosen as the compromise between speed of 
request by Law Enforcement (it allows long weekends plus one day) and 
the size of file.

>It's also part of the EU directive which no-one seems to be implementing.
>
>But all that doesn't matter.
>
>Any one of several thousand designated persons (there are 1,715 
>designated Policemen alone, plus people from the army, navy, mi5, mi6, 
>gchq etc) can serve an ISP a notice demanding the next month's data - 
>the only question is cost.

No, there are also tests of proportionality and "practicability"

>I agree £15 per hour is too low for the required geekery, but eg the 
>ISP has to have interception equipment in place which could do that 
>traffic data collection job, and it isn't exactly hard anyway.

I see another "what is interception" debate breaking out here. How many 
innocent subscribers are you allowed to intercept, to extract some 
traffic data for the one target under investigation?

-- 
Roland Perry