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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.
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.
My work here is dung.
So tell me again....why do the Internet companies have to retain so much data?
From TFA (emphasis mine): Ah yes...yet another shameless use of the 'Lovejoy Gambit'. If you oppose this data retention, you must hate children. You don't hate children, do you?
And once more from TFA: And we segue straight from the 'Lovejoy Gambit' to the '9/11 bloody shirt'. How relentlesly predictable.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
It's nothing but Mycarthyism.
We just jumped back 50 years.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
I can see this data being useful retroactively for things like criminal profiling and possibly being valuable for targeted marketing analysis, but not for catching child molesters and terrorists.
A-Bomb
Nor are we trying to track where everyone goes or what they read. We're ensuring that everyone is fully protected from those bad, bad terrorists. You know, 9/11 and all.
You see, people want to be free. We're ensuring they can be free by these actions. All we ask is that people understand that we're in it for the long run and ask for their patience while we administer these proctology exams.
Just remember, 9/11 was a wakup call. We can't let these terrorists take our freedoms away.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
We should be able to keep track of lawmakers, where they go, who's buying dinner (or whatever is spent), which people they're with, whether they used condoms, and their cell phone records.... with reverse # lookups.
Then we can let ISPs retain the records of where we surf.
Egads:
Amendment 1:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment 4:
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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. These people are just going to far...! We need to start blasting ISP's with so much email that they finally get the picture, that we don't appreciate being spyed on...!
Republicans bring you smaller, less intrusive government and more deregulation.
--
make install -not war
The concept of "harmonization" has been used to justify lengthening copyright terms around the globe. If a major area has a longer term, it is easier to convince everyone to bump up to that than have the term lowered. Governments almost never give back power or revenue willingly.
In this case, Europe was used as a trial balloon by the U.S. While the data retention laws were discussed and debated in Europe, the U.S. policy makers publically commented about the dangers of this sort of thing and how it could lead to a totalitarian "big brother" mentality. All the while they were telling people in the U.S. how much of a breach of privacy this is and how it will never happen here, the back-channels to Europe were doing nothing but supporting the push for mandatory retention and gauging the reaction -- and attention levels -- of the peoples.
Once the E.U. backdoor hammered thru a mandatory data retention law, the U.S. changed its tune. Newly appointed Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and staff started talking up data retention in the U.S. and pointing to Europe as leading the way. We are now well down this path. For those of you hoping to stall for two more years until there is a change in administration (aka "regeime change"), don't get your hopes up because the Democrats are just as bad. They'll still fuck you over but will be telling you how much they love you and how it is for your own good. (The Republicans just leave out the "but we love you" part. It is still for your own good.)
While Europeans love to preach to Americans about how much more privacy aware they are, and how they have Constitutional guarantees and strong laws protecting their privacy and data use, they miss a fundamental difference.
In Europe, the concept of privacy doesn't include the government. Yes, they have strong laws dictating how data is used, kept, stored and brokered so as to prevent misuse by third parties, individuals and corporations. But, they have no real protections about government access and use to all that data. All in the name of paternalistic government, enacted thru "anti-terror", "anti-drug" and "immigration control" laws the gov'ts of Europe have no privacy when it comes to bureaucratic eyes.
In the U.S. the concept of privacy really means just you. It is *your* data and *your* information and privacy means ONLY YOU get to determine where it goes and how it is used. The government is NOT (in theory) given a free pass or exemption to use, store or broker your data. For the longest time the U.S. Social Security numbers had printed on the issued cards "not to be used as I.D." so great was the fear of a "national I.D.". Of course, this is offset by most American's apathy towards anything to do with government. As long as they can afford their beers, pay the bills and watch their idiot box most of them will be complacent about damn near anything that doesn't interfere with any of that.
Don't believe me? How about his for a statistic: more people voted in the last American Idol episode of that television show than did in the last Presidential Election.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Transfer the costs of spying to the ISPs.
Priceless.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
This is another good reason to use https instead of http. Unfortunately, most web sites will only use https for commerce. If Google used https by default, then the government would have to subpoena them directly to find out what a particular user searched for. Likewise, if Slashdot used https by default, then the government would have a lot more trouble figuring out who an anonymous coward was.
"It would be easy Mein Fuhrer, I mean, Mr. President..."
No. "Big Brother" just ensures that everyone is a documented lawbreaker, and that documentation can be used to harrass, blackmail, or remove anyone who offends the ruling power.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
I am the owner of a small ISP in Santa Cruz, California. We get a couple/few subpoenas a year from the FBI, like most ISPs. My concern with data retention of logs, which is what is being asked for here, is: 1. privacy - 'nuff said 2: the cost to the ISP.
We're a small ISP, and we keep a week or two of backups and it's already several terabytes. Now, the feds want us to extract all the access, email and web log files from the backups and save them from 2 years. There's a couple thousand ISPs in the US, spread this cost over the US industry, and you are looking at millions, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per year in additional storage and staff costs.
As a final point, I have 3 kids. Anyone invites me to a meeting and opens it with slides of child porn and my one thought is they are sick sick sick. Most of the people "invited" to the meeting are probably parents, you can sell anti-child porn without showing it to us! What does it say about our AG that he supports torture and has a collection of child porn which he shows to people?
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
davecb@spamcop.net
> No. "Big Brother" just ensures that everyone is a documented lawbreaker, and that documentation can be used to harrass, blackmail, or remove anyone who offends the ruling power.
This, to me, is the scarriest thing that a government can do. Pass laws and then say, "well it's OK, we're not going to use this against people". What? Don't pass laws if you're not going to prosecute every violator. Otherwise it sounds like you're saying, "this law shouldn't affect people that don't cause any controversy... we're only going to use it to take down people we don't like". Great, just great.
If every law were actually enforced, they would go away when people got fed up with them. Imagine every jaywalker going to jail -- jaywalking wouldn't be illegal for much longer after W (or someone else important, not one of us pleebs) had to spend time in a cell overnight.
Speaking of which, I think it's time to start filing lawsuits against the government for all these bullshit laws that are passed. I'm sure there are plenty of other laws that make these laws illegal.
My other car is first.
Why. If they're doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide.