Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.
The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.
"While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children," U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday. "Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level."
Joining Cornyn was Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said such a measure would let "law enforcement stay ahead of the criminals."
The legal definition of electronic communication service is "any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications." The U.S. Justice Department's position is that any service "that provides others with means of communicating electronically" qualifies.
This is another kudgel that law enforcement can use against average citizens if it gets passed. Most people don't know how to even set up the wireless security on their home networks, and this bill would mandate that such people get new routers that can be in compliance with this law, and to be able to configure them for recording everything they do online. At a time when the Republicans should be rebuilding their party by kicking out big government regulators and spenders, they are joining forces with the Democrats to create legislation that would create one of the most dangerous and comprehensive surveillance mandates in the history of the United States.
One of the things that I find most troubling about this legislation, in its current form in the House of Representatives is the weasel-wording of the "facilitates access to" clause:
(a) Offense- Whoever, being an Internet content hosting provider or email service provider, knowingly engages in any conduct the provider knows or has reason to believe facilitates access to, or the possession of, child pornography (as defined in section 2256) shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.
Given the way that prosecutors are known to twist language and seek expansive readings of laws, it's easy to see how the "reason to believe" wording there could be interpreted to include any unsecured wireless network because the owner would have reason to believe that someone might be able to get onto it and use it for criminal purposes. That puts a lot of people in danger because they don't know how to secure the current generation of wireless routers, let alone handle ones that are designed to be in compliance with this legislation should it get passed.
One of the first casualties of this will probably be projects like the open firmware projects for consumer routers. Hackable routers are anathema to this legislation, as they would give people the ability to turn the little black box that this law mandates into something that is a lot friendlier to the owner than law enforcement viz-a-vis privacy rights. If you can modify the firmware, you can change the behavior of the logging software.
For now, they seem to be just wanting to keep the IP address assignment logs and related data, but the camel is trying to shove its snout into the tent and unless we want to share a room with that beast, the only choice is to give it a smart, principled kick. Today, it's DHCP records. Tomorrow, it's HTTP and SMTP headers.
Looks like MySpace is going down. Blogger close behind. Any content host that does not monitor every content post is at risk of the penalty clause.
This is a case of the ISPs own practices coming back to haunt them. If they weren't collecting the data in the first place, congress wouldn't be coveting it.
Fortunately for child pronographers, most of them are smart enough to have a fake ID for internet transactions.
America is gasping it's last breath. Freedom is almost dead, and both parties are preparing the coup de gras. Our government is, in my opinion, now the greatest enemy of freedom.
Um both parties are in on it, not just the Republicans....so try to be a little more less of a douche bad as the Dems are just as bad (if not worse..Bigger Goverment = Big Brother)..
Oh yea...my comment was sponsered by the fairness doctrine.
Both parties are in on it, but the Republicans have pushed it more aggressively. This is one of several attempts by them over the last few years to do something like this; they've usually been the ones to spear-head this sort of initiative. If you had followed this issue more, you'd know that.