Here in the U.S., we don't have rules that require ISPs to retain such data, yet many ISPs (especially the largest ones) happily do so for months or years.

One of the first things I did shortly after going to work for an ISP was to create a formal retention policy. We certainly don't "record" user traffic (with the exception of a tcpdump if I'm troubleshooting, for example) anyways, but nearly nothing is kept for more than seven days. I wish more ISPs operated this way.

Sadly, it's not strange. And there are still quite a few countries where the retention requirements were implemented in the local law so it remains a problem.

In case the reason you link to the cached version is because you can't access the site, the issue might be the HTTPS-Everywhere addon. I had to disable the "PC World"-entry a few days ago to access their articles.

I'm not seeing how these questions are relevant to very many swedes right now, with regard to ongoing world-wide & european political development.

We seem to have the same confused politics in Sweden as usual. Womens rights & equality is important and seeing some progress locally, while from a more global perspective we can actually expect this trend to go backwards.

A substainable economy is left to the "industry", and the government are selling out the last parts of the welfare.

We have a strong right-wing movement in Sweden now, which we didnt have since the early 90's. A movement whose european cooperatives are open fascists.

One of our negihbour counties are being invaded by Russia.

Sweden is in bed with USA and the UK with regards to signal spying (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defence_Radio_Establi... which puts Sweden in quite a bad spot against Russia. Russian cables go through Sweden and wiretapping of these cables is what the FRA are supplying to NSA / GCHQ. This is not even discussed in the Swedish media.

And still, you believe the Pirate Party's ideas are relevant for this year's election?

Not a chance. The only party that seems to care is the Pirate Party, and they've basically only been on the news when the party leader was locked into her bathroom by her cat.

Sweden was among the last EU nations to make the retention a national law, and from what I have read most ISPs are still in the process of developing/negotiating a long-term solution for storing the data. Since they were to pay the entire cost themselves, this should save them quite a lot of money. Especially if you were prepared to believe their estimated implementations costs of one billion SEK.

I don't see the big issue with storing IPs as long as the only way to getting the data is through a court order. My problem is that I don't trust most ISPs not to hand over the data to the police if they simply show up and ask for it "in the interest of the children/national security/etc". Also, the data should be stored for a relatively short amount of time (the EU data retention directive called for a period between six months and twenty-four months, that's way too long).

Of course, when you hear about how the French DGSE was getting raw data from Orange anyway, it's clear that it's not the police overstepping you should feel the most worried about, it's these agencies whose entire purpose involves breaking the law.

For this, one could introduce a "quick freeze" scheme: providers don't store anything (or, if needed for billing etc., delete after 7 days).

Only if police knocks up and tells you "we might need the data from IP address x.y.z.a in the foreseeable future", you store the requested data on secure material.

Then, police goes to court and gets a formal warrant for the data, which the provider then needs to provide the data to the police.

A moderation team catching a criminal act while it is happening is certainly not the same as storing everybody's IP address for up to 2 years so third parties can access it.

Jon Karlung? I have a lot of respect for that man, and love how he is active in the debate.

Care to expand on that? What kind of "shit" what does "this" refer to?