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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."
Mandatory labeling of sexually explicit images will make them much easier to find.
This legislator has been sponsored by Toshiba, Seagate, Western Digital, and Network Appliances.
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... the massive hardware costs ...
Bits and bytes don't weigh anything, so it's all free. Besides, I'm sure the hard drive companies will offer steep discounts for bulk purchases.
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.
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.
At a former employer who announced just such a company-wide surveilance program, I created just such a script. I installed it on the computers of co-workers who annoyed me. Not wanting to miss anything, it tried to access 0.0.0.0 through 255.255.255.255. It's cool that IE is scriptable. Cooler that you can do it headlessly.
Seriously, you use SSL?
You must have something to hide.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
While I realise you spent a good deal of time and effort composing your thoughts there, I must just say, I am unable to accept your comments without a valid stamp from the Ministry of Acceptable Criticism. If you would like to come back and post later, when you have such a valid stamp, then I will be glad to ignore your comments correctly, and within the law.
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?
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! --