Data retention roundup

A quick overview for those of you unfamiliar with what might happen as a result of the data retention policies that the Bush Administration is now pushing. For starters, everything you do without encryption online is fair game. Do you want an idea of how much information HTTP data retention would keep on you for the police and any criminal that breaks into your ISP? Here's an overview. This is also something that individual members of Congress have been pushing on their own, such as Sensenbrenner and Lamar Smith. Smith's proposal, while seemingly not that bad, opens the door for massive privacy violations. Finally, the newest proposal from the Bush Administration puts the burden on web service providers that host lots of images and video. This proposal is in fact one that might be doable and not easily resisted by the service providers because the cost of keeping basic log data such as IP addresses and timestamps is not that hard for these companies to handle. Regardless, the net result would be more intrusion, less privacy, more room for abuse and more burden imposed on private companies.