Are they literally collecting nothing now, not even enough to link IP addresses with subscriber identities? I love privacy as much as everyone else, but real crimes do happen online, and I wonder about the consequences.
Collecting and storing all that data indiscriminately is the wrong approach for preventing online crime. We don't chip and tag everyone 24/7 to prevent RL crime, either.
So how do you know it is effective or cost efficient for that matter.
The implementation of the Data Retention Directive in Sweden pushed the cost onto the ISPs. According to their industry group, the estimates for NRE as well as operational costs as stated by the government was at least a factor 10x to low. We are talking 100MSEK range instead of 10MSEK range. This also worked as a barrier to the market since the initial costs of establishing retention makes it costly to start a new ISP.
I have not seen any analysis on the cost and work done by the govenment to enforce as well as use the data collected. But alternatives such as directed surveillance (not wholesale) should be considerd and not just flatly ignored.
Finally, if NSA when pressed for details can not really come up with more than possibly one case where wholesale surveillance was instrumental, I'm not sure the EU DRD and its implementations are that much more efficient.
Oh, sure. You can implement a curfew and shoot on sight everyone who ventures out on the streets outside government-approved schedule. Then you don't need to chip and tag them.
Or did you mean online crime? Outlaw computers, refer to above technique.
My point is, just because some type of enforcement has a certain level of effectiveness doesn't mean it's right to have it, nor does it mean that any alternative is required to have the same level of effectiveness, in particular given that it gets rid of something far worse.
I run a chat Web site. On multiple occasions, my moderation team has found people raping children live on webcam and reported them. People have been arrested, and children have been saved from abuse. That was only possible because they could be tracked down via their IP address. This isn't a hypothetical "think of the children" argument; it's something that has actually happened, multiple times, in the course of running my site.
As a reminder, we are talking about logging IP addresses only here, not sites you visit, etc. What actual, specific consequences of that logging are "far worse" than making it impossible to catch child rapists?
If you want to seriously discuss this topic and bring child rape into the discussion, then I think it would be best to steer away from hyperbole.
We were talking about EU/government mandated retention of IP + header[0] information at the ISP level, for periods of 6-18 months (depending what country we're looking at).
Refraining from this does NOT make it "impossible to catch child rapists" and if that sort of hyperbole is going to be your argument then I'm pretty much done with the conversation.
[0] it also turns out that you can't tell from "logging IP addresses only" whether someone is a child rapist or not.
EDIT: I see from your profile that you founded Omegle.com. That's cool, I love the concept of that site. I now understand the context of what you say somewhat better (btw didn't know Omegle had webcam support, I thought it was just chat).
However, this is an entirely different situation! Omegle is not an ISP. There are already laws for this! If you're running a chat+webcam website that is going to be used by children, then why yes, your business does have a responsibility for what goes on there. This has nothing to do with EU mandated data retention laws.
Maybe that's the source of the confusion here, Omegle is not situated in the EU, so maybe you weren't aware that there's actually all sorts of mechanisms in place for catching child rapists that do not hinge solely on the indiscriminate ISP-level logging of everybody EU-citizen's usage of the Internet for any purpose, ever. The great thing is that these methods also work against criminals that do not operate on the Internet.
