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ISP Tracking Legislation Hits the House
cnet-declan writes "CNET News.com reports that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives announced yesterday legislation to force ISPs to keep track of what their users are doing. It's part of the Republicans 'law and order agenda,' with other components devoted to the death penalty, gangs, and terrorists. Attorney General Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, and e-mail conversations indefinitely. The draft bill is available online, and it also includes mandatory Web labeling for sexually explicit pages. The idea enjoys bipartisan support: a Colorado Democrat has been the most ardent supporter in the entire Congress."
They may as well legislate that gravity be lessened to solve the obesity problem. It's just as feasible from a technical sense.
You know, I'd like find out what kind of porn or other illicit sites these legislators are surfing and then dredge that up those records to news agencies. See how that flies in their faces.
Secondary storage must be a lot cheaper than I thought
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
This is just sick. Every time I hear this shrill siren about protecting the children I know they're coming for another liberty.
I, for one, don't want my kids growing up in a country run by the thought police.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Now that lobbying is going to be regulated, the parties have to make money somehow. Buy shares in HDD manufacturers and network hardware providers and then regulate to send their sales through the roof - profit!
Pining for the fjords
This shall be pretty onerous for ISPs though. Keeping track of whatever users access. Might drive up the cost of providing these services.
What they need is exactly the opposite: optional Web labeling for non-sexually explicit content.
If you think your site is safe for children then you can add a label to that effect. There could even be a well defined process where, if you labeled your site as safe-for-children and it wasn't, then you could be required to take down the safe-for-children label.
Ideally, there wouldn't just be one safe-for-children label but a variety of specific government defined labels that identified a site as being free of specific types of content (e.g. no nude photos versus no sex photos).
Even assuming that this is done on a tape backup or something as stupid as that, this is pointless and useless because it would be almost impossible to search through all of this info without having it easily importable into a database where you could search through records or have a universal format tha all these log files could be output into, for easy import and read, etc.
Also considering that these records are kept 'indefinitely' the storage and money spent on this should be subsidized in some sense and al that subsidized money will be for nothing because this will only end up in maybe a handful of minor arrests for hacking and NOT in 'world trade center' avoiding events.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives announced yesterday legislation to force ISPs to keep track of what their users are doing. It's part of the Republicans 'law and order agenda,' with other components devoted to the death penalty, gangs, and terrorists.
Why don't they just put everyone in prison? Then we wouldn't have any crime at all. Problem solved.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
If I had a broker, I'd be calling him and buying up stock in EMC, Quantum ATL and every other company involved in storage and retention of large quantities of data.
I imagine many people would simply start tunneling all their traffic to countries without such idiocy.
I thought this wasn't a problem. I thought most websites do post warnings. Is Congress just trying to solve a non-existent to show they are doing something supposedly worthwhile?
So they're going to have pages and pages and pages of my logs showing I connect through a proxy located somewhere other than the US.
Excellent work, feds.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Mandatory labeling of sexually explicit images will make them much easier to find.
Must ..... refuse.... the .... urge .... to ..... become..... electronic ...... terrorist......
/soon to be ghost on the net
Of course, if I , a regular citizen, were to stalk someone in the same way - that's completely different. </sarcasm>
This will be another "unfunded mandate" where they'll just fine you if you fail to spend the money to comply.
All in the name of "protecting the children" and "War against Terror".
The question will be, how much money will an ISP have to spend to record everything, in a secure fashion, for years and years? And at what point will the that expense be LESS than any fine that will be levied for non-compliance?
Folding this bill into a larger "law and order" agenda makes it more difficult for people to criticize it; "what, you against law and order, you filthy terrorist?"
If similar bills had no chance in a Republican-controlled Congress, does it really have a chance now? Doubtful, especially since the Democrats have a comfortable majority in the House.
Besides, I'm not a fan of impractical laws that are extraordinarily difficult to enforce. If this bill became law, do you think certain users would create scripts that visit hundreds of thousands of sites, just to clog the log books?
But they will all start with "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----".
Dummy text to avoid lameness filter. Dummy text to avoid lameness filter.
COntact your representitives and tell them why this is a bad bill.
As also, be professional and use there perferred method of contact.
If in doubt send a letter.If it is real important send a certified letter.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Police also know how to send out requests to preserve information if they've already started an investigation.
The only use for a law like this is to enable fishing expeditions and mass surveillance. It contributes nothing to routine and legitimate law enforcement.
ALL of U.S. Federal Budget will be devoted to War Profiteers-R-US.
Anyone caught posting critical comments of my fiefdom will be detained for extraordinary
rendition.
Thanks for your frequent votes at Diebold machines.
Patriotistically,
George W. Bush.
"the term "Internet" means the cobination of computer facilities and electromagnetic transmission media [...] the employ the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or any successor protocol to transmit information..."
:P
someone please correct me if I'm wrong (I'm no expert), but according to this, as long as we somehow just use UDP we're fine?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
I can only imagine how politicians think:
"Hey how can we kill off a lot of small businesses so our big behemoth telecomm contributors can make more money in the long run? Ooh! increased operating costs! Our friends have the coffers to handle this while their smaller competitors die off. We'll have to make it look like something else though. Tie it to crime. Everyone hates criminals."
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
What's with this Gonzales guy? It's like he's trying to bring Mexican style "justice" to the USA. I saw an interview the other day and he came across like some backwater South American dictator. He sounded like he wanted people to think he was making sense but if you actually thought about what he was saying he didn't make any sense at all.
Whatever happened to people coming the USA because of the Bill of Rights rather than in spite of it?
This is Big Brother Online. Why not just mandate every US citizen wear a video camera, gps tracking device, and voice recorder at all times? All data streamed wirelessly to the nearest DHS office.
we havent had a decent amendment in a while. time for a push for an explicit right to privacy?
"I like to wear big boy pants."
Doesn't this just amount to wiretapping using different wires, only instead of just doing it for individuals suspected of something illegal, it's being done en masse to the masses. Certain members of Congress have been very vocal about how they're against the President listening to the conversations of suspected terrorists or foreign nationals because it might violate their rights...but it's okay to monitor everyone else?
We here at the Future Crimes Department take pride in knowing you're going to do something wrong before you do it so we're going to start building our case againt you now. Thank you and have a nice day.
Just buy me a few hundred 10gig fiber taps and a san the size of the building and we'll be good to go. Seriously, who comes up with this crap. Do they have ANY idea how much traffic even a mid sized provider puts out? I need a room full of servers just to handle the last _week_ worth of email and my poor laptop explodes if I even think about trying to selectivly sniff at gigabit speed. I wonder if I con management into offering an end to end crypto service.......
Hell, just default to ssh tunneling all traffic between all hosts. they won't be able to prove you downloaded anything, just that you pulled 500mb from port 22 of bigbazoongas.com. For all they can prove, you were aggressively reloading robots.txt.
President Eisenhower speaking:
"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government."
+0 Meh
Don't just sit there whining, do something! Send her a quick email with this contact form
Conquest's 3rd Law: Every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents.
SSL. Seriously, why the f*ck aren't people using SSL for everything? It isn't that complicated. Even if they're just self-signed certs, it's still vastly more secure then sending almost everything plaintext.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Once again, we have legislation being proposed which is only going to affect legitimate internet users, and will barely help at all to prevent criminal acts. Even if they do pass this law, and even if the ISPs could (from a technical standpoint) log everything their users do, it's not like anyone planning a crime is going to be stupid enough to fall into the trap. They'll use proxies. They'll use encrypted connections that even the ISP simply can't peer into. And this will all have been for nothing.
I wish lawmakers were obliged to take a few courses in various information technology topics before being permitted to try to regulate them. Nobody in the House seems to understand how the internet works, and this is going to cause real damage if they're allowed to go ahead and pretend they do.
Conservatives like the concept of absolute monitoring of citizens. It's the whole war on terror thing that is their brainchild to begin with. Conservatives brought us the USAPATRIOT Act, etc.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
My first reaction was "Good because wading through terrabytes of useless data will really help win the war on terrer!" However on sober reflection I realize that the very technical infeasability of this is part and parcel of the problem.
For those of you that haven't seen Terry Gilliam's Brazil you must it is an essential requirement for anyone who would just react with the snarkiness I mentioned above.
They can't parse all of that data. A single major ISP on a single day would generate terrabytes of data if everything was logged. In that event any actual law enforcement methods would be swamped by the sheer beureucratic waste of it all. Massive computer systems performing continuous number crunching would still come up with garbage.
But that doesn't matter!
It isn't necessary for this to work. What is necessary is for them to make people perceive that it works at least enough to get it put in place. At that point the system becomes self feeding. Don't like it, well that can get you put on the short list for a check of your habits. Because they can look at a single person's habits, they may be wrong but they can and will do it. But in general the system will be a large self-feeding monstrosoty and any "errors", because there are always errors will be dealt with in the same way that the no-fly-list errors are handled: "not my department, next please!"
Eventually success of this process ceases to be the object only its continuation. Once a large enough beureucracy is established staffed with enough place-men and place-seekers to protect themselves then this will take over. Consider the Drug war as an example. Yes it hasn't hit full steam but think of ho many things today are justified by means of the "Drug War". And take a look at the way justifications for the war are handled. Money for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (led by America's Drug Czar) is spent convincing us to back the drug war or not to vote for legalization. In turn the DEA's budget (paying America's Drug Czar) goes up and who the hell cares if the drugs are stopped. And they aren't even fighting "Terrorists".
In many respects it reminds me of East Germany. At the height of their power the East German Stasi employed one in fifty members of the population as full or part-time spies. This doesn't count the large beureucratic staff that they had or the massive infrastructure that was built and run just to sort through it all. The social costs were enormous as any infraction was targeted for no good reason. The economic costs in turn were insane and deprived the state budget of much of the money that might have been spent say building an infrastructure or feeding the population. No nation on earth had more complete information on its citizens and no nation on earth spent more obtaining it.
Ultimately crime was still committed and even the dissident groups grew because they a) hated the government that much, b) were often flooded with spies sent in by the Stasi, and c) could get away with it. None of the objectives of the Stasi were acheived and East Germany fell, it fell and noone misses it.
This "Law and Order" bull must be stopped, and it must be stopped now! We cannot sit back and think that this is okay or that it will "work its way out. Those of us with a technical mindset are in the best position to explain why this will not work and what a costly destructive system this will be, and we cannot put it off.
For those in the U.S. go Here to find your house rep and place a phone call or send a letter. Then for good measure go Here and tell the Senate not to go there either. Following that try sending a letter to you local paper's letters to the editor. While many of us no longer read the dead-tree press it can and will make a big impact for those that do (read: most people over 35).
Everybody knows that politicians know very little about the Internet (tubes anyone?). There's a misconception that an IP address is as reliable as a fingerprint. The reality is, most criminals can bounce their connection around and evade lame measures like this.
... The rest of the world is going to leave us behind. Doing anything innovative on the Internet will be hindered by procedures, forms, and compliance measures.
IP addresses aren't unique nor do they necessarily identify a user at a particular moment in time. If coming behind an AOL proxy, the only way to discover the actual user, is for AOL to log all outbound TCP & UDP connections. It can't be done... yet.
I know our government exceeds at spreading bureaucracy and inefficiency, but I didn't think they'd start destroying the Internet so soon. Reactionary laws, "moral" laws, regulations, privacy invasion,
Here is how politicians think:
"What sort of grandstanding can I do to get my name in today's local/state media cycle? Let's see, my likely opponent has introduced a bill in the statehouse mandating that sex offenders register their online accounts. . . . Hrm, what trumps pedophiles? Sure, Terror, domestic Terror! that's the ticket!"
Actually, that is the politician's Chief of Staff thinking; the politician is thinking:
"Does this tie make me look soft on crime? If that minxy little intern thinks she's going to get that last donut, she's got another thing coming. Hrm, I wonder who's scheduled to buy me lunch today. It better not be seafood, them shellfish gives me the burpies."
illegitimii non ingravare
Well it looks like the Tor network would get a rather large infusion of users if the bill passes. I already encrypt my email and chat and this is even more of a reason to do so.
Look at what they have also introduced! Beware H.R. 393!!
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Remember that whether or not Big Government ends up forcing your ISP to spy on you, the ISP has the capability anyway. There's no new threat here, merely a new statement of malicious intent and contempt for citizens (which has been pretty implicit for quite some time anyway).
Also remember that Big Government isn't the only entity that may feel it has something to gain from spying on you. No matter what sort of legislation exists for limiting or opening government intrusion into our lives, regardless of all 4th Amendment issues, government is just one your potential adversaries. You have to think about the general case.
This bill changes nothing. It is your responsibility to encrypt end-to-end and take any other measures you can think of, to protect your privacy. It always has been, and always will be. Government will never really have a say in that (although they might try to outlaw responsible behavior).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
the RIAA and MPAA would find this kind of law very useful.
Hmm.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Last time this came up, it was estimated to cost over $400M/year. The estimated number of arrests it would help generate? 700. The FBI said just give them the $400M for agents & they could do a hell of a lot better. The truth is that the 60-90 day cycle that most of these companies already have is enough to cover the vast majority of the requests by the police - this is asking the industry to absorb $400M in costs for an infitesimal gain.
Funny the AG didn't want to do that... guess it didn't sound as good politically.
Well, thank goodness they'd need a warrant at least to look at these new records.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
Well, at least there aren't top-secret huge pipes going from the larger providers directly into NSA and CIA supercomputer centers.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
You ever wonder if the larger service providers are exchanging the government allowing the "two-tiered Internet" thing in exchange for the pipes? No, the government is looking out for our best interests, not looking to extort spy ports out of businesses.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
We here at AT&T are commited to -.0a;ls&)(*^
[error: all disks everywhere full]
[shutting down now]
The post refers to IM and chat logging but they are mentioned no-where in the bill draft. The bill asks that IPs be logged to subscriber names and nothing else. The words instant messaging and chat dont even appear in the text of the the bill at all. The post then links to a previous post about what some people in government would like to monitor - including the IM and chat logs. You cant just draw a line between the two without support facts.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Why is widespread surveillance acceptable to politicians and a good portion of the public when dealing with the internet?
Can you imagine the uproar if smirking ass-face Gonzales (sorry, his first name escapes me right now) proposed that every letter sent through the U.S. postal system must be photocopied, indexed, and stored? Or if all telephone conversations must be recorded in case the Justice Department needs access to them at a later date? People would be livid, and justifiably so.
Yet the internet has achieved a boogey-man status thanks to continual chicken-little scare-tactic reports and media coverage that child predators and terrorists are lurking at every website. The evil boogeymen will come over your tubes, attack your children, blow up your homes!
It's utter crap. Widespread storage and surveillance of communication should be no more acceptable just because there is a different technology involved. You'd think the congress might have more pressing matters to deal with, but I guess not much else is happening right now.
Im not too worried though, I just don't see it happening. That is a massive amount of data we're talking here. Imagine how this conversation would go: "Hello,
Somebody set up a porn website and logged the addresses of who visited it a few years ago - and it was in the news when they released those records.
There were quite a few hits on the sites by congressional web addresses.
Maybe it's time they did this trick again but they (congress) would probably claim they were doing "research".
To protect youth from exploitation from adults
It's for the kids! How dare you be concerned that the government wants to watch your every move at a time like this? Kids are in danger!
We need to make sure all the fine, upstanding people (*cough* Mark Foley *cough*) in government can see what are kids are doing at all times.
From TFB:
(a) REGULATIONS.--Not later than 90 days after the
15 date of the enactment of this section, the Attorney General
16 shall issue regulations governing the retention of records
17 by Internet Service Providers. Such regulations shall, at
18 a minimum, require retention of records, such as the name
19 and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom
20 an Internet Protocol address, user identification or tele21
phone number was assigned, in order to permit compliance
22 with court orders that may require production of such in23
formation.
Because of the vagueness of the bill, it's not clear if a court would uphold regulations requiring saving logs of every action taken by a user through the ISP. Admin law decisions are just too difficult to predict for anyone to say such a regulation would be upheld.
We merely need to hold the power of federal government to the set of specific enumerated powers that is supposed to limit them and we wouldn't need some new right.
I'm going to be running a web crawler 24/365 from my home computer. If enough of us do this, it will be cheaper for our ISPs to pay off our Congressmen to forget this bill. Where can I get a simple throttle-able web crawler script?
Considering that 8 primary stock market exchanges happen to generate 30 Gb of data by themselves over the Internet by and of themselves- EVERY DAY THEY'RE OPEN. It's enough to swallow an OC3 by itself during trading at it's peaks. And that would have to be tracked just like everything else if you adhered to the stupid bill.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You may notice on a re-read that the most fervent supporter is, in fact, a Democrat. Real conservatives would have nothing to do with this stupid bill, which places way too heavy a load on small businesses. And no, I don't consider any of the supporters of the bill conservative in the fiscal sense.
Rip the stupid partisan-colored glasses from your eyes and start to vote for people based on what they believe in, not what large hairy four-legged mammal they associate with! I will happily vote for the right person no matter if they are Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or Green. If only everyone else would do the same.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They'll claim the unitelligable patterns of encrypted data indicate that you are a terrorist. Or that your traffic was routed through countries known to harbor terrorists. Of course, explaining how they know this is a state secret and if it comes out in trial it would weaken the USA's protection against terrorist. Therefore, you don't get to defend yourself very well. In addition, they'll simply seize all your assets anyway.
Or...leaving terrorism out of it...they'll claim an anonymous tipster informed them that you were dealing drugs or kiddie porn. Once accused of one of these crimes...good luck clearing your name!
Blar.
From the ISP's side, they will take the time/effort to simply provide a way for the data to be delivered in bulk to a gov't contractor. From there the contractor does the actual storage. The ISP's will jump at that because it's costs practically nothing. On the contractor's side, when you are buying storage by the petabyte, it's pretty cheap.
/. echo-chamber. The time to have done something about it was maybe 10 years ago.
It still boggles my mind that this is somehow offensive behavior in the
Most of us have *no* clue about the scale and scope of data collection is like in the U.S. right now and I believe most would be very nervous if we actually knew besides what's already been leaked. What brings me some comfort is gov't agencies are not known for their effectiveness or ability to coordinate much beyond a luncheon.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This storage method is based on the accoustical storage method that was proven over 50 years ago, now updated with more recent innovations to provide better bit density and bandwitdh. The way this works is that the digital stream is moduled onto a laser that is pointed upwards. As we all know, space is curved, so eventually the laser beam comes back to earth where it can be reread after a long trip through space. There's lots of space out there and it is free.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Physicist and hard sci-fi author Robert L. Forward envisioned a method to do this that violates no laws of physics. It was in one of his non-fiction collections of essays, either Future Magic or Indistinguishable from Magic. It's a bit far fetched, but quite interesting.
First, find a big asteroid. Put a bunch of metal plates around it with a carbon on the inside and nuclear bombs on the outside. Set off the bombs. If you've set it up right, the plates slam into the asteroid, compressing it tremendously. The carbon fuses into diamond, trapping the compressed asteroid, now a tiny fraction of it's original size, inside. Being very dense, it will have a high gravitational gradient.
Now comes the tricky part. Hehe.
Somehow get the thing down to earth and sit it on some big old diamond pillars. Nanotech and space elevator or space fountain technology would come in handy here. Underneath the thing, its gravity would cancel out Earth's.
Feasible? Um, no. Possible? Maybe. I'm no physicist so I can't check his calculations but he is and I suspect he did them right.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I really don't want to keep finding framegrabs of Prince playing the guitar at the Superbowl when I go searching for my daily dose of PRON. (Yes, people were complaining that Prince, was [looks both ways before whispering] sexual during his performance & his shadow looked like a big penis)
Oh darn, I forgot!
This sounds like an ideal application for write only memory. Linux admins can simply save the data on /dev/null. It is cheap and will never run out of storage space.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Sure, they're bound to get more votes on that one:
"Vote for us, and we'll take away more of your privacy"
Does anyone in the republican party think about the fact that most of their original constituents (in places like texas, at least) are ardent civil libertarians, and hate government intrusion into their privacy / private lives?
In fact, that's the turf that liberals and conservatives seem to agree on.
The repubs are burning away their own support base.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
I am inspired to purchase business-class Internet access, a wireless router capable of V-LANs, aggregate all traffic into one NAT-ed routable IP and open said wireless router to neighbors for $3 a month and pointedly /not/ keep logs. Once charged under the hypothetical law, I can argue that the law represents an infeasible legislated cost of doing business and legislates a crippling cost to my business model - cheap wireless internet access, and /no storage/.
The price of freedom is making it the de facto.
Why do not tool up all busy road crossings with wide frequency generator broadcasting IN VERY SHORT DISTANCE (strictly inside of cross-road diameter range) the very loud pre-recorded warning message, or even live warning by more smart interactive software embedded kinda "Watch out! The bus at the left is gonna kill you now!") It could supposedly suppress any other sound from any gudget, plus causes the interference and unability to use PDAs and other gudgets. After awhile, everybody will find using any gudget during road crossing just useless and counter-productive (Pavlov's reflex). In case somebody need emergency call, s/he anyways has not do this in the middle of the busy traffic, and just steps away a bit to be totally comfortable to do so. Just a thought.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As long as I get to know everything my senators do, see, and watch online. Furthermore, I don't mind being wiretapped as long as I get to listen to wiretaps on congressmen. I will support almost any system that gives me the same privacy from the government as the government officials have from me.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Unfortunately, Tor doesn't stop javascript exploits. Javascript will gladly serve up your IP address without any hacks. And, given the continual large number of javascript exploits that steadily appear, the only way to surf anonymously is to turn off javascript.
Unfortunately, with the large number of technoposers designing the AJAX framework, with the addition of those rolling it out, you limit yourself severely if you turn it off.
Let's not even get into the ways to bust Tor via Flash and the other assorted ilk.
So....Another day goes by and another piece of what's left of my individual rights is sucked away........Why are we as Americans allowing this to happen??????Are we that fat and lazy as a country that we don't care anymore? Are we to busy driving out SUV's through drive thru to realize that it all our fault. There needs to be a line. This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, Americans are becoming targets of ridicule. And we just let it happen. Why is it that whenever there is major tradgy we come together, but as long as it's doesn't immediately affect us we don't care. Excuse.......... me i have to go fill up my SUV and hit the drive thru
Notice that our two major political parties always seem to find the spirit of bi-partisanship and common ground when it comes to giving the government more power and/or screwing over the majority of U.S. citizens?
The only wasted votes are the ones cast for Republicans and Democrats.
How will this effect people who get,index and store pages without knowing anything about the content ?
Sorry, wrong forum. Meant to be in totally different one, http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/ 07/2115233
"New York to Ban iPods While Crossing Street?"
especially considering smaller ISPs would suffer badly, and all ISP fees would likely rise because of this.
Seriously, you use SSL?
You must have something to hide.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
"Conservatives like the concept of absolute monitoring of citizens. It's the whole war on terror thing that is their brainchild to begin with. Conservatives brought us the USAPATRIOT Act, etc."
FYI, The USA Patriot Act passed 98-1 in the Senate and had strong bi-partisan support in the House (those evil conservatives!). The President's "Authorization to use Force" in the "War on Terror" also went through Congress and the Senate with strong support from both parties.
The people that are stealing your freedoms are the same ones that have apparently convinced you that there is some real "Liberal vs. Conservative" or "Republican vs. Democrat" political opposition in this country. They've split the nation along some pseudo-ideological line based on a handful of comparatively unimportant issues. While you're busy arguing about issues in your narrow minded black and white "Liberal vs. Conservative" world view, your freedoms are being eroded. It's called "divide and conquer".
First, I love this idea, bravo. ;)
:(
However, there is a flaw, the earth, solar system, and galaxy itself are moving at incredible rates, the point in space we occupy now will not be the same point that the laser will return to in a hojillion years give or take. BUT! I think you have come up with a very novel approach at creating the proverbial write-only memory. Quick, patent it!
To keep on topic (some mod has been busting my chops lately for trying to have actual interesting conversations), since the bill sets no maximums on the retention requirements I think it's very likely that Gonzalez et al are going to ask for a rediculous amount of data retention. They've been dropping hints about it for years now, something like a permanent record of every website visited would be the first thing they try to mandate. That alone will be a gut-busting storage requirement, and force many non-mega ISPs right out of business. This bill has the potential to radically affect the businesses that provide internet access, and radically alter the privacy people expect when using the internet. While I hope this bill dies quickly, I fear it will ride the tide of "think of the children" with few obstacles.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
If this bill does go through, we the people, will be able to see what congress person is sending inappropriate emails to pages, what porn they like, and who is doing who's wife. But of course the bill would most likely not cover them, they exempt them selfs, for security reason .... Patriot Act and all that ...
Does the post office keep track of what mails what? I've always wondered this. And since they are requiring it of ISPs, that implies that the USPS already does it.
to let McCullagh pimp his articles here? Three links to his own articles in one summary. Holy crap. I sure hope that /. is getting a share of cnet's ad revenue.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
My hardware matches the description of Internet Content Hosting Provider and Internet Email Provider, but the record-keeping portion of the bill refers to "Internet Service Provider" which I presume is defined elsewhere (not in this bill.)
*sigh*.
I do have something to hide.
It's my password. If anybody learns what it is they can use my server as a spam relay, read my mail, etc.
Lamar Smith's bill's language is ambiguous. It requires, at a minimum, the retention of personal identification linked to IPs. The contention that that Smith's bill does not explicitly mandate the retention of IM and chat logs ignores a very important fact. The Attorney General gets to interpret the bill. Alberto Gonzales is the man that recently advocated revocation of Habeus Corpus, citing the lack of its specific constitutional foundations. Gonzales has an expansionist view of the Constitution, as evidenced by his moronic opinion that specific protections not enumerated in the constitution are open season for federal government. I have a feeling that his interpretation would augment the executive branch's power. This is just is one major problem with this bill-- it's ambiguous language is too broad, and Gonzales could liberally interpret the legislation however he feels. More generally, this bill is part of a national problem-- the belief that politicians are justified in sacrificing our privacy. This "struggle" they face, balancing individual liberty against security, is a nonexistent red herring. We can be both safe and free. The bill also represents a scary possibility. If passed, it would establish a legal precedent for acceptable invasion of personal privacy. Socially, this precedent has already been established. The technology industry has already justified, and is currently implementing, the widespread, viral invasion of our personal computer-- in the form of DRM protection of music and software. All of this must be qualified by the following--Smith's bill is aimed at stopping child predators, and I understand and wholeheartedly support his desire to protect our children. This bill's reach extends far beyond the sick and twisted world of pedophiles, though-- it requires retention of everyone's records. Alberto Gonzales could theoretically interpret the bill to include widespread monitoring of internet use. Including AIM conversations and E-mails. I do not believe this bill will make us safer. I am interested to see how many times an ISP could not produce personal information on their customers, and how many times failure of an ISP to produce personal information translated into the loss of a conviction for child predators. My guess is none. One of two things can happen with Lamar Smith's bill in the short term. First, it could die, or second, It could be amended-- perhaps with limits on the retention of records to convicted sex offenders. This bill represents the beginning of a slippery slope for internet privacy, and a more general affront on free speech. We must not let our leaders continue the abolition of rational thought.
Does this help?
Problem: "Attorney General Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, and e-mail conversations indefinitely."
Solution, from 3 stories down on Slashdot: "UK will start jailing the people who trade in email addresses, or any other personal data. The new regulations will result in a two year prison sentence for violating the Act."
Not counting the minor detail of countries involved, does anyone else read this as : "Attorney General Gonzales could be jailed for trading in email addresses and personal data"?
If you pass too many consecutive over-reaching laws, you eventually create something that convicts yourself. Unfortunately, Governments are above the law. I'd love to see a "consitututional crisis because the entire congress discovered it cast itself into jail".
The preview word for this post is victors.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So, way back, I ended up with a block of IP's and have been my own ISP ever since. I, of course, would never do anything illegal but if I did, and the police wanted my surfing records, is there not a 5th amendment situation here?
And in related news ISPs lobby congress to be able to sell the collected data?
As a dual citizen of Canada and the US (born here), can people like me or maybe EU citizens opt out of the illegal recording of our private data, which is barred from data collection by international treaty?
And how long before we hack the IP trail of the very same politicos who wish to spy on us and publicize it?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Remember how to spell DeMoCrAt?
A pox on both their houses.
The technically infeasible aside, there is a darker turn that this could all take...
Next thing you know the body corporate of appartments will be asked to keep detailed records of when their occupants come and go, what they buy and what company they keep.
Probably too long for /., but I'll find a home for it.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
While I think defeating such legislation is the best idea, if such garbage does pass look into using a service like Relakks. For those who don't know this is a vpn service ran by the Swedish Pirate Party. Read their faq for more info. By the way, why not donate to the eff to help defeat this type of garbage in the first place?
"Fuck the children!" what is it? "Fuck the children!" -- now kids, embed that into your head so you will not plague our precious earth with more children to fuck..
sidenote: fuck is not to taken literally, i.e. ("fuck this car", meaning i don't car for this car, i dont care to buy new gas for this car).
Half-truths.
Nobody was allowed to see the legislation itself before it was voted on. It was drafted by Bush and his cronies. It's quite reasonable to say that had the Democrats actually seen the law, they would have turned it down. It's an even bet or better that the Dems will be taking down the USAPATRIOT Act. Soon.
The War in Iraq was based on a huge lie pushed by Bush. Had we found those alleged WMD's in Iraq this discussion about Iraq wouldn't even be happening, as the Iraq war would be both just and highly popular. Bush nailed all of America with what my marketing dept would call a hard core pressure sale: act right now or all is lost. The Democrats would never have gone along with this if they had known then what they know now.
In both cases, the Conservatives initiated these transgressions upon our freedoms and then used pressure sales to push it through. I would invite you to explain how that does not fully meet the definition of the word "brought".
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
1)Corruption due to hitting planets, space debris and astronauts holding zero gravity chick-wrestling tournaments: There are two types of fix for this: ECC (error correction codes) and RAID (two lasers instead of one). Both are well proven and used by Google to locate your house and see you in your backyard hot tub.... and stop doing that!
2) Seek time: Sure, it might take a long time for space to curve back to planet earth, but long access is not necessarily such a bad thing. You just need to store it. If humankind is wiped out before the data returns, well that's just one more file that gets shredded at headquarters. And when the Feds come knocking, you just point to where the data is [up] and they bring in one of those super-hackers you see on TV shows who can bend physics and get to where the data is. Alternatively you can point to the trash compactor and tell the Fed investigator that it's a time machine that they can use to travel to where the data is. For a small fee paid up front, of course.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
they need to require return addresses on all postal mail as well!! Then the mail man can record the addresses of everybody sending you snail mail. As well as any mail you send out. It's a federal service after all, what do you have to hide?
Does anyone in the republican party think about the fact that most of their original constituents (in places like texas, at least) are ardent civil libertarians, and hate government intrusion into their privacy / private lives?
It seems like many of these same self-proclaimed "civil libertarians" end up supporting this type of crap anyway, under the theory of "this will never affect my privacy/private life, because I'm not a terrorist."
I think if you propose legislation such as this, claiming that it is for the children/against the terrorists, you will get broad support from both voting republicans and democrats, all of whom will also claim to be ardent supporters of the constitution.
This gives the government a nice hold over people. "You don't want to tell us what you were doing last night...I'm sure your wife would be interested to hear about the tagged web pages you visited last night". I guess about 90% of married males would end up caving in to such pressure.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Real conservatives would have nothing to do with this stupid bill, which places way too heavy a load on small businesses. And no, I don't consider any of the supporters of the bill conservative in the fiscal sense.
Oh, the conservatives are pissed. But like you said, it all comes down to whether they'll stop strategizing long enough to not elect another Bush.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The internet was fun when the government didn't really understand or know how to use it... Now with every keystroke being run through heuristic scans and filters and all sorts of other "Big Brother" type algorithms, we have lost yet another freedom. See, the U.S. got upset when China wouldn't let their users search for the term "Democracy" or "Freedom" etc. We said it wasn't right, and that the people should be able to search for anything they want, yet we do the same thing, only in the reverse order. We let the users search for whatever they want, but then they get in trouble for it once they have done so.
It must be really nice to tell everyone else how they should do things, while we're making the same mistakes, only in different ways.
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
and it also includes mandatory Web labeling for sexually explicit pages.
I think they should also mandate that sexually explicit pages are labeled according to sexual orientation, hair color, cup size, number and gender of participants, and sex acts; it would simplify finding appropriate pr0n greatly. Ah, the semantic web might finally be put to good use.
Sorry, what do you mean? Do you mean the typo I made?
...how does the government plan to address the issue of unsecure wifi? Though I can't seem to find the links for the slashdot articles, it was mentioned a few days ago that federal courts have ruled that just because the RIAA can link an IP to a specific person's account, it doesn't mean that they were the ones downloading music. This is an obvious fact to most of us. With regard to this current bill, it appears to me that the first person who gets caught doing something can just point to the RIAA cases. As a defense, criminals could just have unsecure open networks and even encourage (via wifi range extenders) random connections. This way there will be a trail of high bandwidth use attributable to mutiple connections. So if they get caught they just point to the router logs and all the connections they receive. Do these people who write laws affecting IT actually hire IT professionals? I'm serious. I thought that the Congressional Research Service was supposed to point out obvious problems with laws.
Sorry, forgot to put use the tags...
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
The sooner one of the politicians supporting this bill get screwed by being all their Internet use/access tracked, the better.
These politicians have no idea what power they give into the ISPs hand.
I would like to challange any politician to give me 6 month of their own "Internet data" and I bet that they will be shocked by the result.
Especially, if they consider, that their "Internet data" from ISPs may very easily end up in the hands of their opponents, political rivals, even terrorists.
Any politician up to the challenge before casting the vote?
If everything my ISP is seeing out of my cable modem is a stream of encrypted bits going to other servers, the only way for them to really cover their ass is to store 100% of the packets. For eternity. (If I'm reading the bill correctly... IANAL, so I might be wrong.) Storage is cheap, true. And, yes, it keeps getting cheaper, and denser. But so does bandwidth. In the last month, I've seen about 5 gigabytes pass through my router. That's 60 GB a year.
For one person. And that's only the data coming in... supposing they have to save it all, they're looking at 120 GB for a year - per person.
Forever.
Course, your other point is valid too - common sense says we don't monitor people for no reason. And we don't require buisnesses to make audio & video recordings of everything that happens inside of them, 24/7, and keep them forever.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
It seems to me that there is a good counterpunch, in this case, and it's really time that the true civil libertarians raise the town alarm. In Bush's wake, I think a libertarian backlash would be quite reasonable; I don't think people are that easily fooled.
"Save the children" just doesn't work that much, and they've exhausted their list, quite honestly: commies, drug dealers, criminals, cultists, child molesters, terrorists. None of those are serious national concerns, anymore. They've flat out run out of reasons to erode our rights.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
So this one caused me to write my congressional representatives for the first time ever. well, maybe the first time since our third grade teacher made us write a 'how are you i am fine' letter to our congressmen. given rampant cynicism on my part i suspect it will do no good, and probably wind up with me on some watch list somewhere so i can go to the top of the list of people to be suspect of, giving the rest of everyone else a break :}
thanks for the great comments, some are very well researched. informative reading.
r.
There is an interesting phrase here which indicates that punishment is only applicable if the ISP "KNOWINGLY" disobeys this data retention law. Thus, the less well-known this law is, the less effective it can be.
They actually passed a law like that in Latvia.
And then it got revoked quietly and quickly, when ISPs made a united front... I mean, honestly, what would be the _costs_ alone to comply with it, I don't even NEED to mention privacy and other legal issues.
Basically, storing packets is already a pretty insurmountable burden (coupled with having to store them -indefinitely-), if you want to add analyzing packets for which ones are chat log, which web requests etc... why don't you become Google while you're at it then?
Be vewwy vewwy quiet..... Congwess is hunting tewwowwists.
I'm assuming that SlashDot will be at the top of the Congressional Watch List, since most of the slashdotting here is usually blasting the politicos and their stupid laws.
Long live the clan of the Wardriving WiFi Moochers! Huzzah!
(clicks heels, salutes)
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
These are very dangerous. If gramma bops you on the beannie with her old fashioned heavy oak rolling pin (not one of the new cheap plastic ones) for dipping your fingers in the cookie jar, you might get hurt.
Oh, and we need to ban the cookies because the sugar may give us diabeties.
And while we are at it, we need to ban the cookie jar because it is made out of glass and if my kid sister gets mad at me and bops me on the beannie with the cookie jar, the glass will break and hurts the two of us.
And finally, we might as well write legislation to ban the three of us, granny, my sister, and me because we just might be dangerous to each other.
Cheers
Cleara
I bet Foley would support this, if he were still in office. He sure does love his "sexually explicit pages", after all.
I hope that this doesnt go through. Logs of who is who on what time with IP tracking is good. But tracking users activities, I mean ISP probably already have this. But making it mandatory and all for the use of goverment collection or monitoring is not a good idea. That would be a big invasion of privacy. If this passes, alot of people will start using proxies and what not to start routing traffic to hide slightly their activities. We might not be hiding anything, its just the fact that i dont want anyone else to kno what im doing.
This has already been done. Maybe AT&T was just a trial for what is to come.
Already, there are tools to monitor all forms of traffic to look for 'keywords' and flag/capture interesting traffic for later analysis. Already, real-time analysis tools are available to do the same with VoIP conversations.
Police state is already here folks -- the screws are just starting to tighten.
And who was demanding this? Where are the truckloads of letters, gigabytes of emails, and millions marching in the streets?
There has been some hinting around - mostly at the state level - a couple years ago that open WiFi will be made illegal - the rationale was [from the published articles, which unfortunately I don't have a cite for at hand] to "protect" the owner of the back-haul connection from "liability". The context here was the state of Michigan, who - it was my understanding - had just become the first state to successfully prosecute war-drivers.
Obviously the "protection" pretext was bogus - this fact was re-inforced by the information that in no case, of the several on record of individuals having been prosecuted criminally for use of an open WiFi hotspot, had the owner of the hotspot been thoght to be the perpetrator of illegal activity. Nevertheless, the "legal eagles" - as usual - choose to penalize the innocent as a "deterrent" to actual criminals, while creating loud, high pitched whining noises about protecting people from themselves...
There should be some Constitutional protection to prevent lawmakers from passing laws based on the idea that they are protecting us from ourselves - even if it's our own [purported] stupidity, imo.
Furthermore, Open Mail Relays have not been outlawed, despite all the legal activity [allegedly] against SPAM email - it seems to me that, before we accept that the people who push these kinds of brain-dead legislation are qualified to do so, we should get an explanation from them concerning how and why it's a plausible defense against "terrorism" and "child porN" to ban open WiFi when they did not find it useful to outlaw open mail relays. If they can explain that, we might have a basis for conversation with the morons who like to claim they represent the citizens as "lawmakers"... of course, if they could do that, the situation that now exists almost certainly wouldn't.
If anonymity is made illegal, only criminals will have anonymity.
"The Internet is made of cats."
"This bill represents the beginning of a slippery slope for internet privacy, and a more general affront on free speech."
Except for the fact that your "slippry slope" has a very big brick right in the middle of it. An economic brick to be precise. Don't think for a minute that there will not be lawyers and lobbiests jumping all over this issue. "Just think of the children" can only be pushed so far, and that limit is money.
"I do not believe this bill will make us safer. "
The same could be said for cameras in London, England.
Assuming:
they just apply "logic", "common sense", "we have to protect children", "we're at war against terrorism" and whatever and based on [1] it wil be "plain" and "beyond doubt" that you did receive some messages, did not log them, broken at least one law and you are terrorist, child molester, ...
It does not matter that you were maybe just upset about your ISPs mail services and unfortunately do not have enought disk space to log everything on your own mail server as they expect you to.
IIRC Freud wrote something along the lines that inteligence of the crowd is lower than maybe even that of the dumbest individual in the group. Politicians in democracies are (to some degree) just extensions of the crowd (big crowd). I think we may expect loginc and inteligence from them (politicians) but if they do not used them, they certainly wont be critizied for this ommision by the the crowd they represent (lead or whatever).
hany
This is a blank cheque. To say there must be a minimum of X information recorded is foolish. Legislation should be phrased the other way around -- a maximum of Y information, and that maximum should be effectively the same as for the phone companies: enough information to record the source and destination of a message (i.e. phone numbers at both ends), timing, and *perhaps* duration of the connection (probably pretty meaningless for most network traffic) or bytes of traffic. Anything more than that should require a warrant. Retaining actual content of the network "conversation", including details such as the protocol used, urls accessed, data exchanged, etc. shouldn't be permitted without one. Phone companies don't record the content of your phone calls, ISPs shouldn't record the content of your network conversations.
Why aren't you running since you have something to hide?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
As well as the people who don't encrypt their wireless access points. In many cities, we're encouraged to share. I bet many of us have access to other providers through our neighbors, through whatever DSL provider might be hot at the moment. If ISPs are by some miracle able to meet the reporting requirements, I think we're going to get a lot of false prosecution based on those who use someone else's wireless network.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
THAT was a great moment in legislation.
"Lets enforce a change on a technology we know nothing about...hell lets change TIME! BWAHAHAHAHA..."
They've flat out run out of reasons to erode our rights.
They don't need any new reasons. They can continue to use the old reasons over and over. For example, despite all of our drug laws, there is still drug activity! Therefore we need more laws, harsher punishments, more restrictions on freedom!
In any case, you have a lot more confidence in the voting public than I do. A large portion of the population was easily duped into supporting the iraq war, and even after the pretenses leading to the invasion were proven to be false (i.e. no WMDs), millions of people still re-elected the guy that made it all happen!
Well, there are many good reasons not to use police force where it's not needed. Economics, efficiency, etc. This notion that anything that turns a profit is worth doing is baloney. If somebody's job were making bombs in a garage it is technically part of the GNP, but due to collateral damage/destruction/injury/opportunity cost of the maker's time, and the time of his clients, it's still a net minus, in most cases. Locking people in prisons (or hiring them as prison guards/police/soldiers/weapon manufacturers/sellers/developers) instead of rehabilitating is just another example of the same thing.
I guess the "peace dividend" that Reagan promised after the USSR's "economic collapse" just never panned out? That was Clinton's boom..possibly. I have no problem cediting that with a Republican; I have a problem with presidential policy that initiates unprovoked wars, imprisons people without due process and seeks to dismantle the Bill of Rights.
It looks to me as if Bush has been hell bent on getting the budget redirected to more war/prisons, training the U.S. army to shoot at armed civilians, etc. His foreign policy, if you ask me, has been a total nightmare.
Who knows, perhaps it's just a geographical phenomenon, but here in California I can't say I've met a single person who supports Bush's policies.
I guess after the florida thing I'm not entirely convinced he even won the first election, much less the second.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer