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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."
Seriously is child pornography going to be trotted out for EVERY encroachment on privacy that we have to endure year after year?
It's getting so old.
Will the FBI give us some evidence already that mandatory retained data has been essential to actually solving some significant fraction of crimes, or some convincing evidence that its lack is the only reason some significant fraction goes unsolved?
Without that evidence, their insistence on invading our privacy instead of protecting it as they're instructed by the Constitution that gives them their powers should just be laughed at.
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All stores and restaurants will have to keep logs of every customer that comes in, whether they buy anything or not, including full video of them while they were in the store. Microphones must be set up at every table in the restaurant to record all dinner conversation. All of this data must be kept for ever and a day, and available to anyone who appears to be in law enforcement. Why is real life any different than the web?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
This goes beyond the data retention laws in the EU, and even those are under a lot of public pressure and currently being looked at by the highest courts. What you'll see is that your guys will back down from requiring access logs and make ISPs "just" keep a log of the IPs of their customers for two years, like the EU requires, and they'll call it a compromise.
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
until someone offers $100,000 to a $15/hr tech to give them two years of Senator X's browsing records. After that, it will have "served its purpose" and will "no longer be in the public's interest".
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ahh the old think of the kids line. It always works and people never have the guts to say that some things don't simply protect kids.
Isn't that the problem with child pornography, that people are 'thinking of the kids'....?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
I have an even better idea. Let's have all law enforcement officials be required to wear audio and video recording equipment at all times, which are available for all citizens to watch. They do work for us, after all, and I think this would help curb police brutality. I know that most officers are good people, but there are a few bad apples, so we can't be too vigilant.
The thing is...for how much they go after the child pornography viewers...is it really that much of a problem?
It is much more rare that I see stories about the actual pornographers being caught and while the viewers are certainly depraved (and you can argue that by consuming the child porn, they encourage those who make it), aren't the pornographers the ones we would rather catch? It wouldn't surprise me if the amount of children actually being forced into child porn is VERY small since the already existing library of images probably contains enough to keep the perverts trading for a long time.
If that is true...then this definitely is an excuse to encroach on peoples rights and use the old "think of the children" excuse because if this much effort was really being put in to catching so few potential criminals...it would be a huge waste compared to what those officers could be doing elsewhere.
Agreed that the producers are much more of a problem. To that end, wouldn't a much better law be that all digital cameras have embedded 3g that transmits all taken images to the FBI directly?
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The 4th amendment is supposed to require a warrant to BEGIN surveillance. The law doesn't say "they can tap your phones and record all of your conversations, but they can't actually listen to them until a warrant is issued against you." No, they can't tap until they have the warrant.
This shouldn't be any different.
Then again, we all know the results of the last large-scale warrantless wiretapping incident (no one was punished, and it's likely still occurring), so I guess it is, in fact, not any different.