Lawsuits, PS/3s and You...

Toshiba's New Self-Encrypting Disk Drive

In January I wrote about George Hotz and his PlayStation 3 hacking (see "Inconsistencies of Law").

Well if you visited his site you are now going to be caught up in the wide net of Sony and its legal team.  It seems that Sony's legal team has been granted the right to collect everyone's IP information (traceable back to you and your computer) who has visited Hotz's site.

The situation is discussed in the letter linked here.

Basically the idea behind this is for Sony to try and prove that Hotz's "customers" for the hack (though it was free) were in California near where Sony is trying to establish the venue for the case.  Hotz lives in New Jersey and apparently his lawyers believe that NJ should be the venue for the proceedings.

Originally the subpoena's were to include companies like Bluehost (Hotz's ISP), Twitter, Google, YouTube, Softlayer and PayPal as well as others and were to include everyone's information.  Hotz's attorney's and others (such EFF) argued that subpoena's for anonymous web visitors to Hotz site were overly broad (no kidding, huh?).

The EFF letter is here.  Basically it argues that there is constitutional precedent for "reading anonymously", that is, the right to visit a web site to read its contents is constitutionally protected.  Ultimately the Judge rejects the EFF letter (see first link).

Eventually both Hotz attorney's and Sony agreed that the information can only be used to determine where "users" of his hacks reside - a necessary element in determine in what court the case should be heard.

What's interesting is that virtually all ISPs in most countries are required to track and log this data.

Which means that in addition to any logging sites like Google do with respect to ads and tracking your ISP is logging your connections (at least) as well.  Connections at least in terms that a government agency can use against you.

The EU, among others, have extensive requirements for tracing internet usage: who, what, when and where as well as six month to two year retention periods.

So even if I connect to Hotz's site in order to write about it I am traced and logged and part of the lawsuit.

With this sort of retention requirement, as well as retention of texting, voicemail and other electronic communications its little wonder that disk storage has plummeted in price over the last few decades - all this information has to go somewhere to be recorded. 

(You can see the price of disk storage here over the last several decades.)  Basically in 1991 I paid $800 USD for a 200 Mb disk drive.  Today I can pay $90 for a 2 Tb disk drive.  Its hard to imagine how much disk storage is currently in use for storage purposes at any given moment.

Every five years or so that means the disk drive industry adds a factor of 10 to storage quantity for the same price (of course today's dollars also buy less, so actually the price of storage is falling over time).

That's a lot of recording (given a rate of 2.5 billion (with a 'B') text messages per day in the USA alone.

(And rest assured that each and every message is recorded along with when, where, who it went to - right along with a link to you.)