DOJ Wants ISPs to Log User Traffic UPDATED

Anonymous Coward writes "Kevin Poulson writes in an article in SecurityFocus that in an early draft of the White House's "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace", the DOJ proposes that the US enact European style 'data retention' laws, which force ISPs to log and retain all of your email headers, as well as your Web browsing history." Nothing worse for the DOJ to be upstaged by Europe in oppressive lawmaking, they must feel like they're losing their edge. Update: 06/19 23:04 GMT by M : The SecurityFocus article has been updated with this note, saying that the U.S. denies having any plans for data-retention laws. Guess we'll have to wait until the plan is released to see.

Comments

Love/Hate the idea

[gerardrj]

Outright I hate the idea, this is just pre-emptive search/seizure. The gov would only propose this because it's in the digital domain where it's A: feasable, B: deemed by J. Pulic to be a non-issue. The could NEVER get such a thing in to action with physical mailings.

But then I thought.... If every ISP had to monitor port 25, isolate all to and from IPs and email addresses (forged or not), and fill up all those hard drives, tapes and whatnot...
Can you image how fast SPAM would drop off as the ISPs attempted to control the now real costs of hosting spammers?