The default syslog in Debian, rsyslog just announced that they've added log anonymization capabilities[0]!
Almost 12 years now after riseup wrote the initial patches to syslog-ng[1] (a few years ago syslog-ng added this capability, so we no longer needed to carry that patch around) it is nice to see that this has been added to rsyslog! In the US, there is no requirement that you log anything on your servers. Riseup, and Indymedia have been telling people this since sometime around 2000-2001, but amazingly few people seem to believe it, nor implement that as the default site policy - but it is true! Ask your friendly neighborhood EFF, they are the ones who made this clear to Indymedia after a confrontation threatened to force a hand-over of information to greedy, overreaching, hungry agents[2]. If you make it clear that is your policy before the IP hungry log police come to feed on your precious stockpile of delicious, delicious data that you have been keeping just for them, your occasional analytics, or just because it is the default... then there is nothing they can make you turn over. Certainly people can speculate on just how the NSA is doing what they are doing and suggest that this may not help in that case, and you may be right, but that is not the point. Why are you acting as a deputized agent of the state, collecting, storing and backing up those delicious digital trails? It makes debugging a little harder, dealing with abuse more of a challenge, but it does let you finally stop obsessing over those web analytics[3]. No data retention, Micah 0. http://blog.gerhards.net/2013/04/log-anonymization-with-rsyslog.html 1. https://we.riseup.net/debian/privacy 2. we fought this, and won. we are still thanking the EFF (we also can thank the Black Panthers and amusingly, the NRA, for setting precendent for these victories). but, while we were fighting this, we had to put the logs they they wanted into the lawyer's hands, to convince them that we were not destroying the data and they shouldn't come and steal our machines. This is how we learned that if we didn't have it in the first place... 3. oh, you are using googleanalytics? yeah I know you are, I see it on practically 95% of the websites I visit. You can thank Google for storing your logs for you, your visitor's IPs and what they were doing are dutifully cataloged on their servers, after being refracted off of Prism into the Dark Side of the Moon. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected] or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
