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Implementation of data retention according to the German Telecommunications Act

The following concerns only Mixes which fall under the German Telecommunications Act.

According to the new German Telecommunications Act (see §113a TKG) some Internet based telecommunication services are required to retain some traffic data starting from January, 1st 2009. The German Federal Network Agency (regulation authority) told us that anonymity services are required to log some traffic data, too. Therefore the Mixes of the AN.ON project will log the following data:

1. A first Mix logs the IP-address, the date and time of incoming connections as well as the outgoing channel numbers of the channels to the next Mix.
2. A middle Mix logs incoming and outgoing channel numbers as well as date and time of the channel openings.
3. A last Mix logs the incoming channel numbers, the date and time of channel openings and closings, the source port number of outgoing connections as well as the date and time of openings of outgoing connections.

According to §113a Section 8 of the German Telecommunications Act it is forbidden to log any information about destinations and requested Internet pages. Therefore neither IP-addresses of contacted servers nor requested URLs will be logged.

As stated above only some of the Mixes are required to log. This covers Mixes operated by Technische Universitauml;t Dresden, Chair of Privacy and Data Security, by University of Regensburg, Lehrstuhl Sicherheitsmanagement and by Unabhängigen Landeszentrum für Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein. Therefore the following Mixes are involved (Date: 12/11/2008, see: http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/status.php):

• both Mixes of cascade Dresden-Dresden,
• last Mix of cascade Forseti II.-JAP,
• last Mix of cascade SpeedPartner-ULD,
• both Mixes of cascade CookieCooker

But even after implementation of the data retention requirements it holds that the AN.ON anonymity service offers protection against the operators of singles Mixes: A single operator of a Mix is not able to learn from the retained data who is communicating with whom

Important Note for January 2009

The implementation of the data retention requirements might lead to longer down times of the cascades mentioned above. We apologise for any inconveniences.