Pedocracy: Noun. A system of government where all consideration for policy ultimately revolves around the children. Noted for its extreme irrationality and quickness to suspend civil rules of engagement wherein the perceived absence of rules and regulations affected law-abiding adult citizens could have even a minimal impact on the psyche of a hypothetical child. Most commonly found in first world countries beset by terrorism, grossly incompetent government leaders and a general societal malaise.

Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months. And some proposals would require providers to retain data that ordinarily never would have been kept at all.

CNET News.com was the first to report last June that the U.S. Department of Justice was quietly shopping around the idea of legally required data retention. But it was the European Parliament's vote in December for a data retention requirement that seems to have attracted broader interest inside the United States.

At a hearing last week, Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who heads a House oversight and investigations subcommittee, suggested that data retention laws would be useful to police investigating crimes against children.

When is it not "for the children?" If you think that the USA PATRIOT Act is ripe for abuse, mandatory data retention laws are even worse. Cue someone to come in and say that they're good laws that will just be abused by a bad president. Anyway, there are very simple and good reasons why one of the last things we need is to have mandatory data retention laws.

• Law enforcement has not made a case for how they have been stymied by the current system which allows them to order data retention when they have probable cause to believe that a criminal act is taking place. By law, whenever they can convince a judge that they have reasonable grounds to suspect that a crime is taking place, they can get an order to force an ISP to retain its logs of the suspected activity. This system has worked very well, and it also happens to balance the privacy of the citizenry with the needs of law enforcement. If law enforcement needs this new power, they need to present empirical, not anecdotal, evidence to the public proving that they have been systematically prevented from enforcing the law because of the absence of these laws and policies.
• This is akin to a universal wiretap. Would you feel comfortable with letting the federal government record every single conversation you have over the phone and then be able to scrutinize your every last word at their convenience? If not, then recognize that this is tantamount to the same thing because they can just hand over a court order requesting all of your logs to be given to them for some small crime and then find out all of your activity for up to a year. Only a naive person would actually believe that law enforcement wouldn't target them because they're "only a smallfry in the scheme of things." People from all walks of life and all socio-economic levels get sent to prison, and there are far more pages in the federal legal code than in all of the scriptures of the top 15 religions in the United States combined. Do you want to take the chance that you won't be the one?
• The cost to ISPs to maintain these records for any "useful" amount of time would be catastrophic to the profitability of most ISPs and would naturally result in making smaller ones less efficient and capable of serving their customers. The bigger ISPs would actually benefit from such a regulatory system because it would impose costs on their small competitors that actually could bankrupt them. ISPs do not typically operate on very high profit margins, so adding even a few hundred dollars a month to the cost operations could have damaging effects on the small ISPs.
• These laws are not even needed for the majority of criminal investigations involving sexual predators looking for children because those investigations start with activities in chat rooms, IRC channels, IM, etc. In such situations, law enforcement officers are quite capable of contacting the service provider and getting their cooperation if it is needed for that investgiation. In a lot of cases, in fact probably most of them, they can simply save the conversation onto their work computer and go arrest the predator when he or she tries to meet up with the "kid."

It may be hard to police what goes on today, but it's no harder than it has ever been. In the roaring twenties, police did not have the authority to chase crooks out of their immediate jurisdiction and didn't have the radios they needed to coordinate chases. Things haven't really gotten more dangerous, it's just that the danger has shifted to newer, less familiar fronts.

Others:

Virginia Libertarian.

Lunda Wright's Research Blog.

Why Now?.

The Lazy Genius.