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FBI Pushing For 2-Year Retention of Web Traffic Logs
suraj.sun writes to tell us that the FBI is pushing to have ISPs keep detailed records of what web sites customers have visited for up to two years. Claiming a desire to combat "child pornography and other serious crimes," the FBI and others are pressing for increased data retention, which they have been doing since as early as 2006. "If logs of Web sites visited began to be kept, they would be available only to local, state, and federal police with legal authorization such as a subpoena or search warrant. What remains unclear are the details of what the FBI is proposing. The possibilities include requiring an Internet provider to log the Internet protocol (IP) address of a Web site visited, or the domain name such as cnet.com, a host name such as news.cnet.com, or the actual URL such as http://reviews.cnet.com/Music/2001-6450_7-0.html. While the first three categories could be logged without doing deep packet inspection, the fourth category would require it. That could run up against opposition in Congress, which lambasted the concept in a series of hearings in 2008, causing the demise of a company, NebuAd, which pioneered it inside the United States."
Welcome to the world of politics...
Seriously though, what happens when you don't use the dns provider of the ISP (either running your own, or using a 3pd DNS provider)? Would that make anyone running their own DNS server (or an alternate third party) a suspicious person? They would only be able to log IP addresses then, and given the proliferation of mass shared hosts, how is this helpful? If a child porn site was on a godaddy server, and you go to another site on the same server, would you have to prove you went to the other site? More guilty until proven innocent...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
As someone that works in the Adult hosting industry, this is going to be poorly received. A lot of our clients are already hurting for money and as such have scaled back their server footprint. We're pushing servers (disk IO) a lot harder than before -- one easy solution we have is to just disable access logs. Writing 1GB+ of log data per hour swamps disks and just adds huge amounts of overhead. Since these logs are of clients browsing through porn ... it'll cost a decent amount of money to actually be able to start logging again AND to store raw log data for two years.