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Bill Would Require ISPs, Wi-Fi Users To Keep Logs
suraj.sun notes CNet reporting on bills filed in the US House and Senate that would require all ISPs and operators of Wi-Fi hotspots — including home users — to maintain access logs for 2 years to aid in law enforcement. The bills were filed by Republicans, but the article notes that the idea of forcing data retention has been popular on both sides of the aisle over the years. "Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that... would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates. ... Each [bill] contains the same language: 'A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user [i.e., DHCP].'"
Logging for 2 years? Who is going to pay for the storage costs, backups, etc.? I'm not going to foot the bill for it or get fined because my cheap Linksys router dies after six months of use and I lose my logs.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Home users are really gonna do this. Oh and they will all patch their machines too.
Yeah, because jail is fun.
they just *had* to get the children involved in this somehow.. the full title of the legislation is:
Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act
is too clueless to secure his wireless router, how the heck is he/she/it going to know how to maintain a 2 year log file of every access?
10.10.10.10 Assigned to 01:23:45:67:89:01 20090220135000
Going to be when the 1st bit is a setting made by me and the MAC address is easily Spoofable.
What next - everyone must register the MAC addresses of all their network kit and sanctions if you change it ?
More idiocy from people that dont understand how stuff works.
The Republicans want this "in the interest of national security" so they can stop the terr-rists.
The Democrats want this so they can save the children from all of that evil kiddie porn, and also so the **AA can better control the media you consume, kill P2P and net neutrality, and bill you for it appropriately.
They both want stuff like this so they can control the citizens better.
Where's the party who doesn't want any of this shit and thinks the government has much, much more important stuff on its plate right now?
What happens when some user with a haphazard setup suffers major data loss due to poor backup patterns? I doubt they'll be subject to jail time. Unless the (American) government provides a reliable way of storing this information for the required period.
Bored at work? Play Game!
Anybody who values liberty should be willing to spend some time in jail, rather than submit to an unconstitutional tyrannical law.
I say "unconstitutional" because it is illegal for congress to order me, in my private home, to keep logs. Their authority ends at the interstate border. In regards to my private Wifi service, the only authority I have to obey is my home state legislature, since I operate completely and wholly within the state.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The first rule of a police state is that EVERYONE is breaking the law. You just pass laws that are impossible or unreasonable to follow and then when you want to come down on someone, you just hit them with a bunch of bullshit charges. So if federal law enforcement kicks down your door on some bogus child porn charge and doesn't find any child porn, they can save face, rather than just admit their mistake, by busting you on all the *other* stuff they found (your marijuana stash, your bootleg mp3's, and now the fact that you weren't keeping 2 years of archived data, and so on).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Wish I had one of those handy forms, but it boils down to this:
Even if I kept logs, if they can hack my network, they can hack my logs. In fact, it would probably be easier than the initial hack.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Remember that post about geeks thinking they are lawyers?
Anybody who values liberty should be willing to spend some time in jail, rather than submit to an unconstitutional tyrannical law.
Translation: the Land Of The Free is dead. You shouldn't even have these thoughts otherwise.
I say "unconstitutional" because it is illegal for congress to order me, in my private home, to keep logs. Their authority ends at the interstate border. In regards to my private Wifi service, the only authority I have to obey is my home state legislature, since I operate completely and wholly within the state.
Do you have an ISP? It won't matter once they get to them.
I have written a number of articles explaining why data retention policies are terrible in words that the average user can understand. The biggest one, IMO, for the average person, is the amount of personal information that their ISP would have to keep on them, and how that would make their ISP an identity theft goldmine for criminals.
The first rule of a police state is that EVERYONE is breaking the law.
As tedious as it is, Atlas Shrugged has something to teach us. Don't bother to read the book though, all you need to know is in the following quote:
Sometimes I feel like a bot whose only real purpose is to paste this quote. But as it is a leading force in American society that people seem to have mostly forgotten, I believe it bears some heavy repetition.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What, now you have to be lawyer for the government not to spy on you? I thought the Fourth Amendment covered all citizens.
The Whitehouse can't even find their own frickin emails. They want every Dick and Jane to keep 2 year logs? Bush didn't go to jail, but Jane probably will.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
Without liberty, you may not have a life or a future, dude.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I agree. The router that we have does not have the capability of keeping logs, as far as I know. Even if it does, it does not make it easy, and I have no intention of figuring out how to make it keep logs. In any event, I am sure that there are some routers that are completely incapable of keeping logs, and those would have to be replaced in order to comply with the law. Who will pay for this? Last time I checked, the government can't suddenly force everybody to pay money for something. IANAL, of course, so what do I know?
Regardless of whether geeks=lawyers or not, the simple fact is that most home wifi boxes aren't equipped to keep logs on this kind of scale.
The Homeland Security agent can demand until he turns black in the face, but demanding isn't getting. Simple answer: No. Tough shit.
Yes, don't generate fake logs.
Instead, you dedicate an old junk-box computer whose job is nothing more than to use a random MAC, connect to the AP, grab an IP, and disconnect, over and over, forever. There's nothing illegal about that.
When the feds ask, you will now have a compressed log of several TB to hand them. Good luck!
Frustration isn't a crime.
Only as long as you let them legislate whatever they want. That's the basis of the whole system. Do you hate what the government is doing? Really? Do you hate it enough to do something about it? Or are you just gonna sit at your computer and complain about it on /.?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
The Libertarian party supports some principles that, broadly speaking, Americans believe in. More or less, these are classical liberal principles, in the mold of Thomas Jefferson. However, few people support their particular hardline interpretation, which tends to emphasize the anarcho-capitalist aspects, play down Jeffersonian elements that don't fit into that (e.g. Jefferson's view that governments should restrict the power of large corporations), and make few exceptions for any reason. Abolishing free public education, for example, is not a popular position. Neither is privatizing the road system. Some for of social safety nets are also popular---people don't want them abused (e.g. the stereotypical "welfare queens"), but neither do they want them to be totally absent. People also want regulation of private enterprise when its activities can cause negative externalities, such as systemic risks to economies (like banks, where further deregulation, the Libertarian position, is currently extremely unpopular). I could go on for a while.
Now if someone started a political party with positions more similar to those of the editorial line of The Economist newsmagazine, I could see voting for them. That is, support free-market economies with regulation and/or costing of negative externalities (pollution, systemic risks, etc.), a moderate social safety net, and liberal positions on social and civil liberties issues.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Good question. I'm fairly certain the original intent of the Constitution was Not to invade private homes. They had interstate commerce in the 1780s (letters, pamphlets) but never intended that Congress should require Thom or George or Ben or James to keep a log of every letter they ever mailed.
"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry
ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect
the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning
may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the
probable one in which it was passed." - Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democrats
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Only as long as you let them legislate whatever they want. That's the basis of the whole system. Do you hate what the government is doing? Really? Do you hate it enough to do something about it? Or are you just gonna sit at your computer and complain about it on /.?
I'd do something about it sooner, but there's a waiting period on purchasing firearms! A well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny!
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The worst thing about this in the real world is that I just don't think that the bad intentions that your quote implies are actually there for the most part. Most of these legislators are just seeking solutions to the problems that exist in society at the command of their constituents (voters and special interests).
These constituents are the people who get upset about having a national biometric database for identification purposes, but demand nationalized health care.
Sure, we don't have a National Database(tm) in some government building, but they do have to have to have access to all of your medical records in order to deal with your claims. In the end, the result is the same: the government has your biometric data, but they can't even really be efficient about it, because of your rights. That situation won't stop the abuses, but it will impede the system it is there to support.
To put it more briefly, many of the very things that we protest about in terms of individual freedoms being lost are things that we'll be more than happy to trade for the government running some service for us or protecting us from every possible threat.
You know, people constantly point to corporations running the local store, the local police and various other services as a corrupt practice. But what about when the government runs everything... because we demanded that they do by demanding more and more laws and programs? They have a monopoly on force, and you get everything from them. That would be bad enough if the government was actually responsive to the citizenry, but we all know that the government is run by the people who can stick their faces in front of the legislators and executives enough.
So, I have very little patience with people who get upset with the government for getting in their faces about stuff like this, but at the same time demand their safety nets and stimulus packages. The consistent message that we are sending the government these days is "fix our problems for us".
The only solution to the issue is not more laws, but fewer and clearer laws. Fewer programs and less expecting of people like Congress and the President to "create jobs" or "protect our children". The government should not become an omnipresent service organization.
Right. And this group of 'guys' with various and sundry firearms is going to do exactly what? Enfilade the police? Create a defensive perimeter? Do you think that some $random_gun_toting_mob is going to be able to do anything other than general rape and pillage?
.50 caliber guns. It's organization, organization, planning and execution. You're better off hoarding old cell phones or CB radios and learning how to make explosives. The kid in the basement with a mesh network OLPC and some crypto is going to me more useful than a half drunk, firearm toting, out of shape guy.
There is quite a bit more to warfare, even guerrilla warfare, then having
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!