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Congress May Consider Mandatory ISP Snooping
An anonymous reader writes to mention a News.com story covering a most disquieting trend in the House of Representatives. From the article: "Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette's proposal says that any Internet service that 'enables users to access content' must permanently retain records that would permit police to identify each user. The records could not be discarded until at least one year after the user's account was closed. It's not clear whether that requirement would be limited only to e-mail providers and Internet providers such as DSL (digital subscriber line) or cable modem services. An expansive reading of DeGette's measure would require every Web site to retain those records."
Citizens may consider a different Congress.
Who runs the country? The mega-companies, or the government? what do congress think they are doing? do they have any idea how much this would COST the ISP's and hosting companies??!
Yay, this time the EU came before the US when it came to spending billions for zip.
What's it good for? Finding some terrorists (the excuse here)? Or child porn traders (the other excuse here)? What is it REALLY used for? P2P snooping. It's that simple.
Now, you cannot store everything that's been sent through the 'net. It's simply BY FAR more than you could credibly store. If they are dumb enough to demand that, it's time to buy HEAVILY into Samsung, Seagate and Matrox stocks. Over here, they are storing "connection data". I.e. who talks with whom.
Now, it might be me, but hasn't that already been rendered useless with projects like TOR and ANTS? Where your data is sent through multiple non-logging hops?
In other words, ISPs will have to spend more money on hardware. Since ISPs aren't some charity organisations, this means they have to up their prices to cover the additional expense. In other words, the 'net gets more expensive.
And this, in turn, means that you're going to fall behind, in use and availability of the 'net, to those nations that aren't dumb enough to demand some pointless logging.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We are witnessing, first hand, the effects of government education. The lack of any meaningful civics classes in the last 35 years is one reason why our elected officials keep pulling this anti-American crap out of their arses. They can't help it -- they are ignorant fools.
If it is acceptable to monitor the time and participants in an on-line conversation (e.g. through email snooping) then why is it not acceptable to have microphones in our gardens, even in our houses, monitoring the time and participants in our off-line conversation?
We would absolutely regard the latter as the grossest, most revolting violation of our individual privacy.
Yet here there would be an acceptance of exactly that violation, with the sole caveat that it is being limited to a given medium of communication, email.
Note in the EU that this violation is now law, for emails and in fact also for all mobile phone calls.
That's what they said about the EU Data Retention Directive as well - pedophiles and terrorists. Now, they're talking about using it to catch filesharers, even before the law's gone into effect.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Is it just me or a law like this is just a police state waiting to happen? This type of information would be ideal for the profling of american citizens. I imagine this works a lot like spyware. It learns from the website you visit and from there computers put you into different categories. If we are lucky it will be something like:
Cat I. Terrorist
Cat II. Child molesters
Cat III. Everyone else
Regretably once that system is in place what will happen is this.
Cat I. Terrorist
Cat II. Child molesters
Cat III.Dangerously liberal
Cat IV. Dangerously conservative
Cat V. Too smart
Cat VI. ????
From there on, all they have to do is keep all the dirt they can on the subjects. If they ever present a problem for the goverment( by voicing their opinions), discredit them. Voila, they have absolut power. All they have to do is keep gas cheap, TV entertaining and food plentiful an the rest of the american citizenry will follow in line.
It's all about finding better ways
I'm not sure I understand Vy you are speaking like ze stereotypical German meine herran, perhaps you making ze racial slur disguised as ze humour?
Seriously, WWII ended over 60 years ago now, only someone really insular would still find Nazi jokes funny. I presume that's what you were implying in your own muddled way, no? That America is turning into a Nazi regime? Go to Germany and you will be hard pushed to find people proud of the events of WWII. Sure, there is a far-right minority, which worryingly is gaining some mindshare, however in general I think mocking privacy curtailments in a faux German accent is just a shite, lazy thing to do, and it sounds even more hollow when you suspect it was posted by an American. As we all know there is no room left for Americans to be mocking the (lack of) freedoms and democracy in other countries.
Not only Tor, but freenet is starting to look pretty reasonable.
There is NO way they are going to limit this to "terrorists and pedophiles". They will abuse this power like they have every other one in the past.
Want to know what the result will be? Nobody will host websites in the US. They'll just host it in another country where these laws don't apply, and pay less since that hosting company doesn't have to store extra weblogs.
"for the children" is the new rallying cry of modern fascism.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Yeah, which should silence people who only think Republicans are retarded powermongers. Democrats and Republicans are, in my opinion, cut from the same tainted cloth.
Actually, its not racist at all. Its a "look where we're headed". Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.
By historical necessity. When you start out as a frontier society spending every day in the hard-scrabble for existence, that sort of experience leaves a deep impression for generations. Voters in the West do support tightening the purse strings. You may recall that Ross Perot's central theme was paying off the national debt. He did very well across the western states.
On other economic issues, too, people in the West are unhappy with the way things are going. It's not like the urban centers where public transportation is available. Across the whole of the West everyone drives very long distances to shop, work, and all the other things Americans do. So $3/gallon bites hard. Plus the price of natural gas, which a great many people switched to during the 80's to avoid the high price of oil, has skyrocketed as well. Had the past winter been colder, you would have seen a tremendous uproar over the price of heating. As it was, it hurt too.
There are right-wing pseudo-Christian elements in the West, to be sure, but voters are more independent than anything and supported Republicans where they did more on economic issues. But now the divide is widening.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The constitution is to protect us from the will of the people. The people would be spied upon as they have nothing to hide. The people would give up their 1st amendment rights for perceived safety, and the rest of the bill of rights for that matter. The people would have drug laws to protect them from the responsibility of parenting. The people would have loyalty oaths and mandatory flag worship and government as a religion because they love their country so much. The people would close our borders and insulate us from a big scary world and globalism, except for our armies which would show the world the American way at the point of a gun. The people think they are entitled to cheap gas and the rest of the world's resources. The people need politicians to stand for constitutional principles and act like a responsible parent by setting rules and boundaries to the government, but they act like the irresponsible ones who give their petulant children everything they demand. Its time to stand up against the people and for the constitution.
I write fiction, so I look up all sorts of wierd things on the Internet. At one point I was researching the layout and construction of buildings at Cape Canaveral because one of my stories is about people stealing the space shuttle just before a category six hurricane. It wouldn't be hard for a paranoid sort to imagine that I was planning some attack.
Anyone remember the movie, "The Man with One Red Shoe?" Anyone can appear guilty if placed under enough scrutiny.
We need to fight back. We are losing the war on terror, because we are helping the terrorists. We are allowing our representatives to take away our liberties in exchange for empty promises of security. If we allow this to keep going forward, we'll be giving up our liberty for good. To paraphrase an old quote, all it takes for evil to triumph is for the rest of us to do nothing.
The U.S. has enemies and we need to be vigilant in our defense against them. But how is this change going help protect us? The sheer volume of information being kept will be prohibitive. Those that are really up to mischief will find a way around this monitoring. The rest of us will have our every experience on the web left open to scrutiny.
I can easily imagine people writing viruses that cause your computer to visit all sorts of questionable sites, so that millions of innocent people now have profiles that match those of the terrorists the government is looking for.
I don't know how to solve the problem of terrorism, but I do know that taking away my rights isn't part of the solution. The U.S. needs to stand as a beacon of liberty. We should be the one place in the world where you can be sure that you are in no danger from the government if you have done nothing wrong.
Fight back. Vote against anyone who tries to take away your rights, and remember, the Bill of Rights was meant to protect the most important rights, not to list the only rights you have.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
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