U.S. Government Demands ISP Data Retention

dlc3007 writes to mention an article in the New York Times discussing data privacy. The article expands on the U.S. Government's 'request' last Friday at a meeting between Robert S. Mueller III, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, and the executives of several Internet Service Providers. The ISPs were required to retain data on users, for trials if subpoenaed. Right now they're asking companies to do this. The threat is that, if they don't comply, legislation will follow. From the article: "The Justice Department is not asking the Internet companies to give it data about users, but rather to retain information that could be subpoenaed through existing laws and procedures, Mr. Roehrkasse said. While initial proposals were vague, executives from companies that attended the meeting said they gathered that the department was interested in records that would allow them to identify which individuals visited certain Web sites and possibly conducted searches using certain terms." We originally covered this last Sunday, but more details have been released on the meeting since then.

Comments

Working Clicky

[eldavojohn]

Here is a working link to the story. Please use the RSS feed from newspapers when submitting stories!

How do you do this? Go to the RSS feed page and select the category your article appeared in. Then do a search for the title and pull the link that declares it to be an RSS user. It's that simple!

I don't think this is morally wrong as you're going to their site and you're still getting advertisements. Slashdot is really just a hand selected RSS feed so we might as well use RSS credentials. It saves us the time of registering and it saves the site admins some wasted space & e-mail traffic due to shill registrations.

Libraries have faced this for years

[davecb]

Different jurisdictions have required by law that libraries simultaneously

• retain per-patron loan information,
• retain circulation information, and
• destroy personally identifying per-patron loan information.

This looks insane, but actually resolves rather easily.

To oversimplify, libraries keep statistical information, so they can get their grants for books loaned per year, retain patron loan information until the book is either returned or paid for, and then destroy the link from book to patron.

This is so common that all the vendors of library circulations systems "enforce" it in software, citing the need to use precious disk space for current records.

In at least one case, we made it surprisingly difficult to reconstruct old patron-book links from backups.

Consider this a word to the wise authors of ISP record-keeping systems.

--dave