House Panel Approves Bill Forcing ISPs To Log Users

skids writes "Under the guise of fighting child pornography, the House Judiciary Committee approved legislation on Thursday that would require internet service providers to collect and retain records about Internet users' activity. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections. A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses. Per dissenting Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): 'The bill is mislabeled... This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.'"

Comments

Reciprocal?

[Teun]

As CP is a global issue it has a clause to share this data with EU authorities.

No? I thought so...

Re:Damn Tea Party!

[hazem]

Where the hell is the tea party? They talk about keeping the government out of our lives, but when it really matters they aren't anywhere to be found.

That was my thought. When I used to fit more within conservative politics, the idea of limiting government monitoring of citizens an appealing part of the ideology.

Now I fit more within the liberal side of things (I've drifted to the left, but I think the country had drifted right), but I still don't like the idea of all of the eavesdropping and records retention used to monitor citizens. The right still talks about how evil and communist-like we liberals are. But it's sad to me that it's the right that's been implementing all these things that I consider hallmarks of a totalitarian regime. It's funny and sad that it's one of the more extreme Democrats (commie that he is, right?) that's challenging this bill.

Re:Look out anyone who is married!

[kwoodard]

By the way, you should also know "Patriot Act" intercepts are starting to show up in divorce court. People should read the text of the proposed statute carefully to note whether the data can only be use for "criminal investigations" (e.g., terrorism) or "all lawful government purposes" (e.g., divorce).

Re:No kidding

[hairyfeet]

Simple: The market starts free, a few groups become uber-powerful, then buy the laws to ensure their monopoly never has to deal with competition. See "forever minus a single day" copyright extensions, DMCA, and a million other examples.

Sadly, and as much as I thought Rand was a looney, someone should cue up her "making criminals" line because with THIS much data they can make anyone they want into a criminal at ANY time. If they pull up a log that says you visited X server on date Y 2 years ago, how do you disprove it? Hell how do you even prove the data on server Y is the same as what was on server Y 2 years ago? Look at the old Whitehouse.com to see how squatters can take a domain and turn it.

This isn't getting a warrant to access someone's PC to look for child porn, this is entirely "guilty until proven innocent" wholesale data collection. And the truly fucking sad part? I have a friend that actually works busting CP in the state crime lab and he says the child pornographers don't use the net since that dragnet that made the news a couple of years back. What do they use now? Encrypted DVDs they send each other by USPS. That's right, the fricking mail.

So I urge everyone here to vote Green or New Whig straight down the line in 2012, and to urge everyone you meet to do the same. It is obvious that BOTH the Ds and the Rs damned near to a man have been bought by the corps, and the will of the people as well as the constitution is being completely ignored by these traitors. our last hope before having our own Arab Spring is to have real third and even fourth parties in this country, and a vote for a D or an R is now a "wasted vote" because they simply no longer listen to the people anymore.