The Bush Administration just can't seem to stop trying to push data retention policies on the public and private businesses. Unfortunately, this proposal, might actually be a feasible one for them to get away with forcing on service providers:
The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate, CNET News.com has learned.
That proposal surfaced Wednesday in a private meeting during which U.S. Department of Justice officials, including Assistant Attorney General Rachel Brand, tried to convince industry representatives such as AOL and Comcast that data retention would be valuable in investigating terrorism, child pornography and other crimes. The discussions were described to News.com by several people who attended the meeting.
A second purpose of the meeting in Washington, D.C., according to the sources, was to ask Internet service providers how much it would cost to record details on their subscribers for two years. At the very least, the companies would be required to keep logs for police of what customer is assigned a specific Internet address.
I was reminded by the article of last year's attempts by the FBI to force companies that make network devices such as routers include wiretapping features. One thing is very clear about the FBI, Department of Justice and the Bush Administration, and that is that they don't seem to really care about how much burden they would impose on the public, or how many liberties would be infringed by some of their more dubious crime-fighting proposals.
Now, what is problematic with this current effort, and it's just that for now, a proposal. However, the catch is that it would not be that difficult for a service like Flickr to log its users' activity, provided the federal government doesn't demand a lot of detail. Simply tracking the IP address that the upload came from and the time stamp would impose a negligible cost to them. To put it into perspective, the system log for my installation of Movable Type, which keeps a record of what's going on with my blog internally, has 4,253 entries in it as of this moment and those entries consume a whopping 494.9Kb of data. Even at a rate of tracking 1,000 images costing 100Kb of storage, one of these would be enough to track a few billion file uploads.
Beside the costs imposed on the service provider, mission creep is going to be a problem here. Other websites, from forums to blogs, will probably be required to keep their logs in case of criminal activity. The government is already practically swimming in data, so it remains to be seen if this sort of thing will even do any good at all.
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