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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...
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! --
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
It's only a matter of time.
The real people behind this are currently trying to shove the same stuff down the population of other countries (e.g., EU nations like Spain and Germany). After that it won't be long until there's something like the agreement to share SWIFT transaction data.
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.
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.