Support for U.S. Mandatory Data Retention Laws

chill wrote to mention a C|Net article about an upswell in support for a mandatory data retention policy here in the U.S. From the article: "Top Bush administration officials have endorsed the concept, and some members of the U.S. Congress have said federal legislation is needed to aid law enforcement investigations into child pornography. A bill is already pending in the Colorado State Senate. Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months."

Comments

Re:Quick easy solution

[Tackhead]

> They want to prosecute child porn offenders? Fine. Put it in the text of the law. Retain the data, but make it unusable in court except for child porn cases.

Nice in theory. Government doesn't work that way in practice.

Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.

- http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169254&cid =14107454

Re:Wow, this really sucks.

[timon]

The local police department (Keene, NH) has an officer who focuses almost exclusively on child predators. No data retention, no warrantless eavesdropping, no sneak&peek searches. He just logs into a chat room with a teenage-sounding screenname and waits. It doesn't take him that long before someone is offering to meet, send bus tickets to him, or sending pornographic materials to him. They arrange a meeting place near Keene and pick up the predator when he arrives. Simple, straightforward sting work that's netted nearly 400 arrests in the last few years. Occasionally they get search warrants for the guy's computers if he sent a large amount of porn to the cops and add that to the charges, but they have more than probable cause for that search warrant.

It seems that certain politicians want to automate this basic police work by casting a wide net and filtering for certain phrases or activities and eliminate the pesky payroll obligations. Same thing with cameras on street corners and traffic lights - why pay some cop what an image-matching algorithm, face-recognition system, or radar gun will do for free?