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DOJ Wants ISPs to Retain All Customer Records
doubledoh writes "CNET reports that the Department of Justice is 'quietly shopping around' the idea of requiring ISP's to retain all data of their customer's online activities for at least several months. The SEC already mandates that publicly traded firms retain all company emails for at least 2 years, but it looks like John Q. Public may also soon be subject to similar Constitutional violations. Big Brother, here we come."
land of the free indeed. such idea's come from idiot pencil pushers with no technical savy. if i was to engage in an activity which i didn't want to be monitored, i'd encrypt the traffic and i sure as hell wouldn't be using my home internet account to do it. a law like this is going to be used to spy on it' citizens and deny them liberty, not to catch criminals.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
You are secure in your documents. However, these are the documents of the ISP.
Those documents can't be trawled without a court order, so there isn't really anything about this that is in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
It may be a little bit distasteful in its invasion of privacy, but it is no more unconstitutional than cameras at intersections or strip searches at the airport.
Terrorists will NEVER find a way to communicate that cannot be read/heard by others....
suckers...
In europe they're trying to get this same thing going.
People are far to easy about this, camera's in the street, etc etc etc... Not in just the US, but in Europe as well.
So are the DOJ offering to pay for all this? Storing that volume of data isn't free, in fact its bloody expensive. Why should the ISP's have to pay for this themselves, they won't get any benefit from it.
Its like a hidden tax
They don't need to log everything in the beginning. The goal is not to take all our freedoms and privacies all at once. They just want to get the ball rolling. They will ask the ISPs to log a totally unreasonable amount of data knowing they will settle for a lesser but still privacy killing amount. Then every few years as storage technology improves, more and more will be logged.
This beautifully refined process of slowly chipping away at our rights always begins like this. Figure out a way to kill this right now or you never will.
Brokerage firms are regulated by the SEC. The SEC has long mandated that brokerage firms retain ALL communications with and about customers (including phone calls and paper mail) in order to allow the SEC to investigate violations of SEC rules. These searchs are carried out with the knowledge of the investigated firms. The only time this would affect a customer's privacy would be if there was a suspicion of an SEC rule violation, such as the Martha Stewart case.
Allowing for searching of ISP logs is much more a violation of customers' privacy. There is no notification to the customer, the Justice department keeps asking for the ability to review these records without issuing a subpeona and without any oversight.
Presenting the ISP logs as an extension of the SEC rules is both incorrect and dangerous. The SEC rules are primarily for the protection of customers and are well founded Constitutionally. The ISP snooping is not.
A good way to raise a politically effective storm of protest over this would be to suggest that the data could also be used to find people who are violating gun laws, say by flagging anyone who's looked at the web site of a gun shop, or done a web search for gun information. This would get the NRA all riled up, and the spineless politicians would back down.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
Even since the 9/11, the Bush administration has been violate people's privacy under the pretense of safeguarding national and world security.
Many of the measures taken however are raising suspicion; their effectiveness is questioned
by security specialists such as Bruce Schneier, and they pose a threat to the citizens' funadmental right for privacy. The US government has devoted itself in a race for collecting information; reading habits, travelling and shopping preferences are just a few examples of the kind of information being aggregated.
I believe there are shadowy motives behind this information collection race. I think that corporations are trying to monitor people's habits to be able advertise and sell their products more effectively. Apart from that, I believe that the government, or corrupted government officials, might be acquiring and selling information to industrial rivals.
And all these under the pretense of preserving the security of the world... It is the least to say vulgar, seeing corporations taking advantage of 9/11 in such a shameless way.
I personally have no problem limiting my freedom a bit, for the sake of national security. But when the government abuses my goodwill, and uses it so shamelessly, I feel like being raped again and again.
Tracking -everything- all users do online might be problematic - but certainly a list of all the web sites a given user hits in a month wouldn't be too tough.
Presumably they'd need a warrant -require- an ISP turn over the logs - but there'd be nothing preventing some of the more "patriotic" ones from "cooperating in a more pro-active fashion". Ie - just turning over a nice synopsis of everything on a monthly basis.
Don't think it's possible? There's a case in Seattle where the FBI tried to get a library to hand over a list of everyone who checked out Osama Bin Laden's biography.
I've personally provided web server logs to police without a warrent because a bomb-threat was involved. I'm 100% sure that case was legit - but I probably would've helped if I was only 60% sure. In reality - they were my employers servers - so I didn't really have a choice.
"We think 1 of the 10,000 customers you service might be up to something really bad. We'd really like your logs. All of them."
Are you gonna say no? Is your boss going to let you say no? Requiring ISPs to have the data on hand is not far from requiring the data be readily available to the government upon a "request for cooperation"
US Constitution
Amendment IV - Search and seizure. Ratified 12/15/1791.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Unless they wish to provide funding for this, it will kill small mom and pop ISP's that are barely making a profit with small scale operations. Now they would have to invest large amount of cash in hardware and storage space to archive huge amounts of data. I don't see this going anywhere, and it's going to be impossible to enforce.
Part of me wishes the mother fucking terrorists and paedophiles would just start using encryption so we can forget about all these logging/tapping ideas for good and find something else. Obviously what's going to happen in the real world is that the government(s) will waste billions getting these systems working and 3 months later everyone will be encrypting like there's no tomorrow, then these systems will be worthless. I guess after that we will just have to wait until 19 biometric ID-card holding terrorists hijack some more planes and wonder as everyone says "how did this happen?? they had ID cards!!" or perhaps until someone is gang-raped in front of 10 cameras by masked attackers who never get caught.
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How is this a surprise? Go look on google groups and see some other quiet actions being taken. Many people who ordered from chemical suppliers, even frickin plastic tubes and such from many years ago are getting threatening letters. These are legitimate citizens who are into chemistry (many licensed) getting pushed around by the DOJ. The government has MANY regulations that cost businesses a fortune to comply with. If you want to get paranoid, you could say that "the system" does these things because that way the poor man will NEVER be able to get rich, because only the rich will be able to afford to comply. So, if they can comply, and their competition is reduced in the process (i.e. smaller businesses), that is all the more bank in their pockets. Personally, this is rediculous. If someone wants to commit crimes, they will find a way. This just reduces our liberties and privacy. Isn't this really what the terrorists wanted all along? A paranoid country spending tons of money on the mere thought of an attack? wide spread panics? companies going out of business due to new regulations? This is what the terrorists wanted. All it took was 19 guys to turn us into our own worst enemy.
I RTFA and, again, "child pornography" is being trotted our as the excuse for violating everyone's rights. Does anyone have any idea how much kiddie porn is really out there? I'd go look but I don't want anything hanging around in my browser cache.
Actually, no I don't. I don't see that anything is being seized, at least not in the traditional sense of taking it (possibly by force or under threat of force) from my possession. Likewise, merely recording the information cannot possibly qualify as "search".
Now, if those logs were actually searched or data mined, then perhaps it would fall foul of the "unlawful search" clause, but failing that, I don't see that it does violate that particular Amendment.
(Of course, IANAL, etc)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
thats true... but this will only serve to push more people into using encryption and more websites into automatically setting up and sending session key encrypted data to any browser that requests it. secondly, this legislation has no effect on users that would simply hop on one of the many available open wifi hotspots. all this will serve to do is to make things more difficult for law abiding citizens while exposing them to all sorts of privacy invasions at the same time...
Corporations can basically pay to have just about anything enacted into law if they have enough money to throw at the issue and it's not so egregious as to piss off Joe Sixpack. There's no way the large ISP's will go for this. Look at who some of these large ISP's are. We're talking about large media conglomerates and cable and telecommunications companies. This would probably cost them a lot of time and money to setup and maintain so there's no way they'll go for it and they'll spend a lot of cash to defeat it. They'll score points with the privacy advocates for fighting it and it will benefit them in terms of profitability. It's a win - win for them. This will never happen.
Or they would come up with some way to keep voters from directly voting on issues--by making them elect representatives who would actually make all the real decisions.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Find and compromise as many of these files as you can. Identify as many politicians' accounts as you can. Post all of the log files on the internet.
If even half of the log files found are as embarrassing as I'm imagining then all of Washington would go into a buzz about protecting privacy.
...when next the US Post Office will be required to scan and image and index into a searchable database every letter and document that flows thru the postal system.
I feel like SNL's impression of Alex Trebek here durring a session of Celebrity Jeapardy.
Sean Connery: Preserving your Privacy for $1000
Alex: "Distributed Anonymizing Proxy network of Onion Routers"
Sean Connery: What is your mother's onion sized breasts! I hear she distributes them pretty well, pansy boy!
Alex: I'm sorry, the answer is 'What is Tor?', found at http://tor.eff.org./ And if you talk about my mother again... I will be forced to thrash you.
Cleaning the net one sed at a time! s/sex/sermons/; s/hot/holy/; s/goats/thebible/; www.holysermonswiththebible.com
If privacy is indeed lost, we must work all the harder to regain it. If it is not yet lost, we must work hard to keep it.
"This beautifully refined process of slowly chipping away at our rights always begins like this. Figure out a way to kill this right now or you never will."
Never? Abusive dictatorships get violently overthrown at some point or another, how long it takes to be corrupted into another abusive dictatorship is a measure of the wisdom of the new system.
We are just following the age old cycle: Rebel, rinse, repeat.
Thinking about it, I realize that most people, to say the least, aren't trying to hide anything, and won't encrypt.
The danger comes from not just the government, which is bad enough, considering the direction they are going -- no subpoenas, rooting through your life on fishing expeditions -- but from hostile parties using their proven insider connections to the ISPs and the government to conduct their own surveillance and destruction campaigns against targeted individuals.
Cults such as the Moonies and the Scientologists have shown that there is no limit to the means they will employ to destroy even the slightest criticism. They won't even have to leave the bunker with such data available. They can phone in disaster on their "enemies".
Journalists will have to live spotless lives to avoid being ruined by even the most casual search into their life's database, thus insuring the silence of the fourth estate -- even quieter than they are now.
Of course, the people who will utilize this data, government officials and the shadowy almost-governments such as cults, as well as the very wealthy and/or celebrated, will be immune to such searches, being largely anonymous in their activities. They'll make sure of that.
I don't think so since your ISP would have all that data anyway. But who knows? I figure at some point they will realise that you can get bomb making information (aka chemistry books) from a library and decide all libraries will have to have cameras that record every book everyone picks up.
All this 1984 shit pisses me off. I'd rather take my chances with the terrorists than give up all privacy and freedom. The administration can go fuck itself.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
No, the world was not with us when we 'stopped it'. The UN declined to authorize the use of force. There were more nations in Bush's "Coalition of the willing" than there were in the attack agains Serbia
And there was no ethnic cleansing going on. Yes there were attrocities comitted, bhe mass graves that were used to sell the war to the American and European public never materialized.
Yes reprehensible things occurred, but they were nowhere near the level of the crap that was being reported. It certainly didn't compare the crap that that was going on in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and it doesn't compare to the crap that is going on under Robert Mugabe RIGHT NOW.
BS. Clinton was a lawyer, he doesn't get to claim he didn't understand the law when he signed it. Besides, there was plenty of criticism of the DMCA when it went through Congress. He knew what he was doing when he signed it.
No, that would be Waco.
I work for a small ISP in NW Ohio. I have a few questions:
Who is going to pay for the disk space to store all of these logs. we couldn't possibly afford to keep even a weeks worth of logs. We have 2 DS3's for upstreams, out of two POPs, you know how much bandwidth that uses?
Who is actually okay with the policy of sniffing the innocent in case they might do something wrong? Sorry, no, this is just more repbulican facsist bullshit. Anyone who believes this is a good idea clearly doesn't value freedom in any real sense.
Who is going to station armed guards in my network, to keep me from making it official company policy to kick the logging machines as you walk by them?
As an employee of an ISP, I can say we are unprepared to do this, we are unwilling to do this, and..... fuck the DOJ, this is just wrong.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Just because one guy has a bazillion files, doesn't mean that everyone on the planet must have contributed to his collection. A fairly small number of file traders, especially if a few are in some country with a thriving kiddie porn industry, could easily account for a very large number of files. No need to assume that because there are a lot of files, there must be a lot of file traders.
There may BE a lot of file traders, but log-trawling starts with an assumption that the majority of people must be guilty, which is a lot of why I object to the whole log-trawling concept.
If you aren't guilty of kiddie porn, surely we can find SOMETHING you're guilty of...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?