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New Bill Would Require US ISPs To Retain User Info
Wesociety writes "The House Judiciary Committee, lead by Rep. Lamar Smith, is preparing a bill which would require internet service providers to retain information about their users to aid in criminal investigations. This particular bill would be a smaller part of a large measure to strengthen sanctions against acts such as child pornography. The most interesting part of this bill however is not who it targets but rather who it does not. The bill would make wireless companies exempt from the requirement to store user data." Declan McCullagh gives a fuller report at CNET. Update: 05/14 00:35 GMT by T : Note: Smith has yet to release the text of the current bill, but it seems an easy bet it will have much in common with his similar-sounding legislative push in 2007, which resulted in the unsuccessful SAFETY Act of 2009.
If you care about privacy or security, you're either a child molester or a terrorist, I guess.
Wow. Once again congress, a body largely filled with old farts who has zero concept of how far reaching their laws might hit. RIAA just had an orgasm.
So child porn people will have to use 3g/4g/wifi based inet to avoid being nabbed easily.
Leaving just the average joe left to get screwed by the long arm of the law.
If this passes we will see lots of innocent people prosecuted due to buggy audit trails that are never tested. Seriously, when is the last time anyone tested their audit code to make sure it works properly? If it doesn't crash the app no one worries about it. I've seen all manner of bogus data in audit trails.
Now ISPs will need audit trails on DHCP leases, connections through proxy servers, NAT translations, email senders and receivers, clock synchronizations...
I lose my privacy while pedophiles start downloading child porn onto their iPhones instead?
This action violates my treaty rights as a Canadian Citizen.
As well as those of all EU citizens.
Which the US is signatory to by international treaty, which by force of law and the US Constitution, is of a higher level than any Congressional action or bill.
Period.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The average joe doesn't break the law.
I'm just saying.
Then there's no reason to retain the average joe's info.
I'm just saying...something intelligent, unlike you.
Child porn people will continue to steal wifi, like they've been doing for years.
That's fine, LTE is faster than DSL anyway. :P
The government has no right to require other citizens, whether natural or not to collect information in the hopes to catch an undefined crime that has yet to be determined. This is an invasion of our privacy and we need people to speak up and stop this circle jerking of our rights.
Child pornography and terrorism have been the major excuses for taking away civil rights the last few years. And they are useful excuses, as anybody trying to oppose a proposal made with such an excuse has to suffer guilt by association, even if completely unfair.
Setting the issue of data retention aside for the moment, why exempt wireless providers? Bribe^H^H^H^H^HCampaign contributions?
Wouldn't this violate the Equal Protection Clause by pursuing pedophiles with wire-based broadband while ignoring 3G equipped perverts?
Have gnu, will travel.
I just love how everything "for the children" or anything relating to child pornography (which is absolutely despicable) can strip our rights away without notice. It's absolute bullshit.
so following that line of thought there's no reason to retain anyone's info. gotcha ;)
Can anyone with relevant experience at a major ISP give an estimate of how big the 90-day rolling logfile would be for even one company? Would it be terabytes/million subscribers and exabytes for an entire country? Do any of the major ISPs have the infrastructure to store this much information at the moment? Imagine the electrical power needed to store this much (mostly useless) information--not exactly environmentally friendly. Perhaps a Beowulf cluster could... (ducks)
You mean like the exact same bill that is going through Canada right now because of the god damn conservatives. This is why a majority government is never a good thing for canadian citizens. At least then the crazy crackpot theories that each individual party has gets muddied down instead of being passed into legislation.
(Liberals tried to introduce the same thing in 2006 and failed. Now this bill is being passed as part of a large omnibus bill because it would never pass on its own).
Have a look here: http://www.ottawasun.com/2011/05/05/lilley-tory-crime-bill-an-attack-on-our-liberty
There are less sensationalist examples out there, but I couldn't find one today. (I believe Michael Geist goes into more detail).
Why is "Child Pornography" Cited as a reason for any new Big Brother Internet legislation?
Didn't the Repubs take Congress on the promise of creating more jobs? Their legislation certainly doesn't indicate they're doing much.
Correct. They should not retain data.
How is this any different than having a goverment employee assigned to keep track of what you are doing every moment of the day, just in case you do commit a crime? God I love this country...
How can we call ourselves free without requiring our family members an children to turn us all into the Gestapo, I mean police, I mean the recording industry.
I would be curious to see how much the MPAA/RIAA spent in lobbying for this. My gut reaction is that this is truly the doing of "Big Copyright", veiled in the always-righteous crusade against child pr0n.
Are you fucking daft? The hell he doesn't, he just either realize it or recognize it as breaking the law.
Good luck with that. The teabaggers and other mentally deficient groups will just claim you're soft on kiddie porn, and probably end up arresting you sooner or later.
Great Intellect...
I just imagine the look of total shock on their faces when someone tells them their laws dont actually effect the rest of the world where the Internet resides.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I presumed the govt will be asking for those records. Since "in free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns", and I am a citizen who is supposed to be part of this govt... may I please have a peek at those records? No?
...why not?
It never got out of committee. But now Lamar Smith is the chair.
Lamar Smith [R-TX21] chair
John Conyers [D-MI14] ranking Democrat
Sandy Adams [R-FL24]
Howard Berman [D-CA28]
Steven Chabot [R-OH1]
Jason Chaffetz [R-UT3]
Judy Chu [D-CA32]
Howard Coble [R-NC6]
Steve Cohen [D-TN9]
Ted Deutch [D-FL19]
Randy Forbes [R-VA4]
Trent Franks [R-AZ2]
Elton Gallegly [R-CA24]
Louis Gohmert [R-TX1]
Robert Goodlatte [R-VA6]
Trey Gowdy [R-SC4]
Tim Griffin [R-AR2]
Darrell Issa [R-CA49]
Sheila Jackson-Lee [D-TX18]
Henry Johnson [D-GA4]
Jim Jordan [R-OH4]
Steve King [R-IA5]
Zoe Lofgren [D-CA16]
Daniel Lungren [R-CA3]
Thomas Marino [R-PA10]
Jerrold Nadler [D-NY8]
Mike Pence [R-IN6]
Ted Poe [R-TX2]
Ben Quayle [R-AZ3]
Mike Quigley [D-IL5]
Tom Reed [R-NY29]
Dennis Ross [R-FL12]
Linda Sánchez [D-CA39]
Robert Scott [D-VA3]
James Sensenbrenner [R-WI5]
Debbie Wasserman Schultz [D-FL20]
Maxine Waters [D-CA35]
Melvin Watt [D-NC12]
Most of the time the really offensive proposals include a variation on the theme "to combat child pornography" to frame anyone who opposes it as someone who support child pornography. Seems to me that we are becoming a Democracy in theory but not in practice, maybe we always have.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
criminals that use tor, or any sort of system that encrypts traffic and passes it off to multiple nodes before it reaches a destination?
Do you think GPS satellites only transmit? They don't need to retain data they can receive directly and store forever.
Give me a law or police order that will remove all child pornography forever, and I'll find you a parent filming their children in jail as a sex offender.
filming their children
In the bath. I forgot to add that. fuck.
Give me a law or police order that will remove all child pornography forever, and I'll find you a parent filming their children in the bath in jail as a sex offender.
Do you mean "the law" as in "the child porn law" or "the law" as in "any laws"? Because I can guarantee you that practically everybody in America breaks SOME law. There are so many things illegal that it's practically impossible to live as an entirely law abiding citizen.
Here's the first relevant link I came across:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842.html
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Interesting viewpoint.
The general thought is the "tea baggers" are more likely to be against the child porn laws as a growth of the Federal government, and that it should be handled at a lower level.
sells Storage =)
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Either we're outraged at the level of privacy invasion perpetrated by big business, and should out-law cookies / require a do-not-track opt out -- OR -- We require big business to record the browsing habits of citizens for many years, just in case anyone wants to have a look.... BUT WE CAN'T HAVE BOTH.
I just love how everything "for the children" or anything relating to child pornography (which is absolutely despicable) can strip our rights away without notice. It's absolute bullshit.
It's interesting how so many boogedy-boogedy scare tactics have been used about child pornography over the years that even the mere mention of the term causes most people to use a qualifier like "which is absolutely despicable". Do you do the same when you mention murder (which is absolutely despicable) in a sentence? Or even actual child rape (which is absolutely despicable)?
Probably not.
Yep, even read a story about a pedo using a cantenna from a boat to a coastal home. The homeowner got his house raided.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You don't need to add that. All you need is a parent filming their daughter running in a sundress taking a tumble. Panties visible in one frame? Sex offender.
Yep, makes the thousands of terabytes downloaded a year via wardriving worth it.
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
I met a guy who was arrested for child porn and he wasn't smart enough to use wireless to avoid detection. I'm sure a lot of them are though.
The ISP has to keep records.
Ok.
Now if I were an ISP and wanted to protect my users, I'd try to make these records as un-useful as possible:
1. Shorten the DHCP lease time.
2. Hack the dhcp server code so that it ignored the renew my address, but passed out a new address each time.
3. At the same time, hack the logging code so that time stamps were in microfortnights since last dhcp server restart.
4. In addition, tweak the format so that it was not trivial to parse. The easiest way to do this would be to have variable numbers of fields. Having multiple dhcp servers logging to a common log file with differing formats would also work.
5. Run your servers on Newfoundland time.
6. Do NOT keep servers time synchronized.
7. Use layers of NAT so that a client address at the ISP office level corresponds to hundreds of users.
Whenever a request came in, you would print a relevant block of data, but to save paper the log files would be printed in 6 point Squint font, and the block of data provided would run hundreds of pages. The output data format is neither by time stamp nor IP address so that someone has to wade thorugh the entire block.
What else could an less than cooperative IPS do?
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
I suspect Piracy.
Thats all this is about. Child Pornography is such a TINY fraction of online activity.
Every CHILD in this country uses torrents. Very few people seek out child porn.
It's that evil bugaboo child porn! It's gonna destroy us all! Save us, Uncle Sam! Aaaaaaaugh!
I just love how everything "for the children" or anything relating to child pornography (which is absolutely despicable) can strip our rights away without notice. It's absolute bullshit.
I'm going to venture a guess that this has much less to do with child pornography, criminal investigations and counter-terrorism than you might think at first glance, although I'm sure that law-enforcement types are salivating at the mere thought of having this capability. What it does concern is copyright infringment and anti-file-sharing efforts: I guarantee that you'll find RIAA/MPAA fingerprints all over this, if you look hard enough (that and the fact that the DoJ has been overrun with ex-RIAA attorneys.) If not, well, it sure is remarkably convenient.
Wireless providers are, if anything, placing increasingly stringent limits on how much data users may transfer using their devices, whereas the 250 Gb cap that is becoming common among the big ISPs (yeah, AT&T, I'm looking at you: you just had to take a page out of Comcast's playbook, didn't you) permits plenty of illegal downloading to go on, and the media companies figure that they'll have a lot better chance in court if they're using ISP provided records rather than the manufactured "evidence" provided by Media Sentry (or whatever they're calling themselves nowadays.)
Fact is, there are a lot of pressure groups that want these requirements, and they want them bad. That they have no legitimate need for them, and that having them may very well violate numerous Constitutional provisions means little in the current political climate.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You don't need to add that. All you need is a parent filming their daughter running in a sundress taking a tumble. Panties visible in one frame? Sex offender.
It's about that bad. In my State, if you take a leak against a tree or a fence post, and a cop happens to see you ... instant registered sex offender.
Incredible, really.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Does this mean we can finally read Carl Rove's treasonous 'lost' email?
NOT!
How is this any different than car manufacturers giving the government the car gps data of how fast we are going or that our vehicle drove to a remote location?
I am glad my younger generation will never put up with this kind of CLEAR privacy issues.
Only a few years left of baby boomers having the reins and CLEARLY ruining the entire opporation.
Who's up for a complete government overhaul?
That's fine, LTE is faster than DSL anyway. :P
FedEx and a CD burner is faster than most DSL.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
How many Canadians do you think do business with US ISPs?
Twinstiq, game news
when everyone starts using tor?
Exactly. Anybody that is actually serious about child porn uses different methods. At minimum they use TOR and FreeNet, then establish webs of trust that are actually pretty hard to get into. There have been several articles in the last few years about huge child porn rings busted in multiple countries that were using pretty sophisticated methods to communicate and nothing was in plain text. It required some actual detective work and identifying the victims to make headway in those cases. I can remember it was a big deal that the law enforcement figured out a way to "unswirl" the photoshop effects that some of those pedos were using to hide their faces while buggering poor little boys in Thailand.
You surf long enough on the Internet for "teen porn" and within about 20 minutes of clicking links to links to links you will see your first questionable picture. Give it another a couple of minutes and you will find your first transient child porn "site" willing to take your money to let you in and the pictures on the signup page are those that leave no doubt it is a little girl under the age of 11-12. We are not talking about some web cam of a 17 high school girl showing her your tits, but prepubescent girls being victimized.
That's the other side of the coin. There is already enough material produced that organized crime in Russia and Eastern Europe just repackages it and attempts to sell it no different than drugs.
Which is easier? To track and bust some people that really are not child molesters at all, but just went to "deep" in their depraved travels in the Internet Underground or actually going after the foreign actors that are hosting this shit?
I'm not posting anonymously here. Seriously, how many guys here have been surfing for porn and clicking away and then have seen some questionable stuff that really look like child porn?
I know I have. It did not get me excited and was just a huge speed bump if you catch my meaning.
This whole thing is based on the premise that mere possession, which can be temporary internet files and some really really transient actions that are more permanent than you think, of child porn should be a crime and that you need to be labeled as a sexual predator for the rest of your life.
That's stupid. Using it to raid some guys house (which has happened to some people hosting TOR exit nodes) and ruin their lives is just crazy. He did not have hard drives filled with child porn and images and his basement did not look like something out of 8MM with Nicholas Cage.
If the point of keeping DNS queries and connection logs is punish and raid anybody that came into contact with unlawful material, than we have some really unsophisticated and bone headed law makers. Not to mention we know of at least one case in the UK where this kind of hysteria was used to victimize some poor guy and that luckily for him they caught the person attempting to frame him.
I want child porn to be stopped too, but let's actually identify the people producing it and not people that are inadvertently exposed to it.
Of course......... that could just a whole "lions, tigers, and bears OH MY" deal and the real point behind the tracking is not to protect the children at all but use to monitor people and construct useful profiles to governments and corporations so that they can advertise to you and governments can categorize you at various levels of activism unpopular with the current administrations and particular political parties.