We're handing over to any would-be dictator the foundation of a police state, and Republicans are to blame for a lot of it. We now have a democrat trying to whore herself out to the Bush Administration's latest pet surveillance state effort to create a mandatory data retention law. Why are we doing this? Why are we creating a regulatory and technological system capable of handing over to any would be abuser a virtual cornucopia of data that would have made a KGB agent green with envy?

If you are actually daft enough to believe that this has anything to do with child pornography after reading the plethora of success stories like this, then I guess there is no way to convince you of anything. The reality is that law enforcement have gotten extremely good at tracking down people who are engaging in online sexual exploitation of children. These are the people who molest children and in some cases, are also the ones filming the child porn. In other words, we may not be really doing much about the pictures, but we're busting the actual molesters right and left. I'd say that's quite an accomplishment.

If this becomes the law, everything you do will be recorded for the government to possibly find out about. Have you ever done something by accident that wouldn't look very legal? Well you could be in for a nasty surprise if the government gets ahold of your records. After all, the next step will be to run mandatory searches on the log files to see if there was any potentially illegal activity. As this points out, even using something like Tor could get you in major trouble if someone else is doing illegal things while using Tor.

What burns me about things like this is that we may never have a true police state a la China or Cuba, but if we do, then we will have created the infrastructure to make one very efficient from the git go. It's like parking a car in front of a drunk man, then letting him have the keys if he just grabs them out of your hand.