HP enters fight against crime with Dragon

HP IS helping governments in their fight against terrorism, organised crime and drug trafficking. Its answer is DRAGON (Data Retention and Guardian Online).

The EU has recently approved data retention requirements which it expects the 27 member nations will incorporate into national legislation.

This would require service providers to store information about traffic across their networks including fixed and mobile telephony, email and voicemail, Internet usage, VoIP telephony and text messaging.

If they stored everything as plain transaction records, the results could easily run to hundreds of terabytes of data storage each year. HP's DRAGON reduces that requirement to something more manageable whilst still providing access to specific records in a close to a real time environment.

An HP spokesman revealed that the system was originally designed for Italy which historically has always enjoyed a long battle against organised crime. Hence it is already in place with seven service providers in both Italy and Turkey.

In addition to utilising standard HP storage and server products, the DRAGON system incorporates key technologies from Cisco (application-aware networking) and Oracle (database).

In the past, intercepting communications and tracing the parties involved has played a key part in aiding authorities solve certain kinds of crime. In some cases this can be has high as 80 per cent of the total, according to HP.

There does, however, appear to a problem with VoIP telephony. It's not clear whether DRAGON can always track the sender and the recipient of a VoIP call placed using a service such as Skype, for example.

If the call was initiated from a PC and passed across broadband to a mobile phone network and then terminated by an independent VoIP supplier, it's unclear if all three providers would be capable of providing the relevant information. µ