What is never kept
There are no logs. The absence follows from how the equipment is built, and the yearly audit examines it.
PositionAudited yearly
The short version
Telephony keeps no record of who called whom, who connected from where, who joined which room and what was said. The absence is structural, so a later assembly cannot reverse it by decision alone. The equipment has nowhere to write such a record, the software that would write it was never installed, and the audit each year examines the absence itself.
How each part of it is impossibleEight places a record might have lived
How the absence is built in
- Call detail recordsDo not existA billing system would need them. Calls are free, so no billing system was ever built, and the exchange software has the record-writing paths compiled out.
- MediaNever traverses a serverCalls and small meetings are carried directly between the two ends. The mixer used above four participants forwards without storing and holds nothing after the room closes.
- Connection tablesIn memory, never on diskThe IRC and Matrix servers hold current connections in memory. The machines have no writable storage mounted for that purpose.
- Address leasesNot written downLeases live in memory and are gone at renewal. There is no historic table mapping an address to a household at a past moment.
- Name service queriesAnswered and forgottenThe resolvers keep no log, filter no query and return no false answer.
- Traffic inspectionNo equipment existsThe federation has no deep packet inspection equipment. Buying any is outside its licence and the purchase would appear in the audited accounts.
- Matrix mediaThirty days, then goneThe single exception in this list. It stores files that people chose to upload, and records nothing about their behaviour.
- Interception capabilityWas never builtThere is no lawful interception interface in the core, because the core is Open5GS as published.
What it costs and what is still visibleCons
What this costs
Fault-finding is harder. The desk on 101 has no record of earlier faults on the line and works from the caller's description. Engineers work with live measurements on the pair in front of them.
Moderation is weaker. Channel operators act on what is in front of them, because nothing older exists to consult.
Abuse is harder to trace. A person misusing the network cannot usually be identified afterwards.
What is visible
Neighbours on a shared cable can see that a pair is active, as any meter has always shown. The person called knows who called. A room shows its participants to each other.
The federation gives no undertaking for traffic outside the Republic. Traffic leaving through the gateway at Corvaluri enters networks with their own arrangements.
CheckingThe Audit Office
How the absence is verified
The Audit Office examines which storage is mounted where, what the exchange software was compiled with, what the machines actually write, and whether storage has been added since the previous inspection.
The report is published in full, with measurements in physical units, alongside the federation's accounts. Any person may put a question about it and receives a reasoned answer within the period the law fixes.