ISP Tracking Legislation Hits the House 332
cnet-declan writes "CNET News.com reports that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives announced yesterday legislation to force ISPs to keep track of what their users are doing. It's part of the Republicans 'law and order agenda,' with other components devoted to the death penalty, gangs, and terrorists. Attorney General Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, and e-mail conversations indefinitely. The draft bill is available online, and it also includes mandatory Web labeling for sexually explicit pages. The idea enjoys bipartisan support: a Colorado Democrat has been the most ardent supporter in the entire Congress."
huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why don't they just put everyone in prison? Then we wouldn't have any crime at all. Problem solved.
What do they think they're trying to pull? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends which prison. Supermax [spunk.org] doesn't have a crime problem, I can tell you that. 23-hour a day lockdown.
Confusing (Score:2, Interesting)
We here at the Future Crimes Department take pride in knowing you're going to do something wrong before you do it so we're going to start building our case againt you now. Thank you and have a nice day.
Putting everyone in prison (Score:5, Interesting)
"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government."
First Reaction and Real reaction. (Score:5, Interesting)
For those of you that haven't seen Terry Gilliam's Brazil [imdb.com] you must it is an essential requirement for anyone who would just react with the snarkiness I mentioned above.
They can't parse all of that data. A single major ISP on a single day would generate terrabytes of data if everything was logged. In that event any actual law enforcement methods would be swamped by the sheer beureucratic waste of it all. Massive computer systems performing continuous number crunching would still come up with garbage.
But that doesn't matter!
It isn't necessary for this to work. What is necessary is for them to make people perceive that it works at least enough to get it put in place. At that point the system becomes self feeding. Don't like it, well that can get you put on the short list for a check of your habits. Because they can look at a single person's habits, they may be wrong but they can and will do it. But in general the system will be a large self-feeding monstrosoty and any "errors", because there are always errors will be dealt with in the same way that the no-fly-list errors are handled: "not my department, next please!"
Eventually success of this process ceases to be the object only its continuation. Once a large enough beureucracy is established staffed with enough place-men and place-seekers to protect themselves then this will take over. Consider the Drug war as an example. Yes it hasn't hit full steam but think of ho many things today are justified by means of the "Drug War". And take a look at the way justifications for the war are handled. Money for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (led by America's Drug Czar) is spent convincing us to back the drug war or not to vote for legalization. In turn the DEA's budget (paying America's Drug Czar) goes up and who the hell cares if the drugs are stopped. And they aren't even fighting "Terrorists".
In many respects it reminds me of East Germany. At the height of their power the East German Stasi employed one in fifty members of the population as full or part-time spies. This doesn't count the large beureucratic staff that they had or the massive infrastructure that was built and run just to sort through it all. The social costs were enormous as any infraction was targeted for no good reason. The economic costs in turn were insane and deprived the state budget of much of the money that might have been spent say building an infrastructure or feeding the population. No nation on earth had more complete information on its citizens and no nation on earth spent more obtaining it.
Ultimately crime was still committed and even the dissident groups grew because they a) hated the government that much, b) were often flooded with spies sent in by the Stasi, and c) could get away with it. None of the objectives of the Stasi were acheived and East Germany fell, it fell and noone misses it.
This "Law and Order" bull must be stopped, and it must be stopped now! We cannot sit back and think that this is okay or that it will "work its way out. Those of us with a technical mindset are in the best position to explain why this will not work and what a costly destructive system this will be, and we cannot put it off.
For those in the U.S. go Here [house.gov] to find your house rep and place a phone call or send a letter. Then for good measure go Here [senate.gov] and tell the Senate not to go there either. Following that try sending a letter to you local paper's letters to the editor. While many of us no longer read the dead-tree press it can and will make a big impact for those that do (read: most people over 35).
Re:Won't somebody please think of the children! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good luck (Score:2, Interesting)
A record of something isn't a notation of a piece of information in this sense. It's the actual information itself. So record retention could include the genesis of new databases with whatever information the AG requires.
Mostly what scares me about that text is that it only specifies the minimum information that will be required, but no maximum. I can envision some crackpot scheme where the ISP has to include your home address and telephone number in each of those records as well, just to make law enforcement's job easier. I don't know if any of you have noticed, but it seems like most of the recently passed laws that have shredded our privacy have been enacted to make law enforcement processes easier, and it's not hard to imagine how this could go overboard.
Remember: The government isn't in business to guard and maintain your rights. The government is in business to stay in business.
Zero G on the Earth's Surface Is Possible (Score:3, Interesting)
First, find a big asteroid. Put a bunch of metal plates around it with a carbon on the inside and nuclear bombs on the outside. Set off the bombs. If you've set it up right, the plates slam into the asteroid, compressing it tremendously. The carbon fuses into diamond, trapping the compressed asteroid, now a tiny fraction of it's original size, inside. Being very dense, it will have a high gravitational gradient.
Now comes the tricky part. Hehe.
Somehow get the thing down to earth and sit it on some big old diamond pillars. Nanotech and space elevator or space fountain technology would come in handy here. Underneath the thing, its gravity would cancel out Earth's.
Feasible? Um, no. Possible? Maybe. I'm no physicist so I can't check his calculations but he is and I suspect he did them right.
Re:Hard disks are obsolete - write-only memory! (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there is a flaw, the earth, solar system, and galaxy itself are moving at incredible rates, the point in space we occupy now will not be the same point that the laser will return to in a hojillion years give or take. BUT! I think you have come up with a very novel approach at creating the proverbial write-only memory. Quick, patent it!
To keep on topic (some mod has been busting my chops lately for trying to have actual interesting conversations), since the bill sets no maximums on the retention requirements I think it's very likely that Gonzalez et al are going to ask for a rediculous amount of data retention. They've been dropping hints about it for years now, something like a permanent record of every website visited would be the first thing they try to mandate. That alone will be a gut-busting storage requirement, and force many non-mega ISPs right out of business. This bill has the potential to radically affect the businesses that provide internet access, and radically alter the privacy people expect when using the internet. While I hope this bill dies quickly, I fear it will ride the tide of "think of the children" with few obstacles.
Re:Good luck (Score:1, Interesting)
For example, this directly from the cisco downloads for the popular 7200 model:
ENTERPRISE IPSEC 3DES LAWFUL INTERCEPT
ENTERPRISE LAWFUL INTERCEPT
IP IPSEC 3DES LAWFUL INTERCEPT
IP LAWFUL INTERCEPT
there were a total of 15 images, so a quarter have wiretap. posting AC because I don't know how much of a secret this is meant to be.
Does the "in-home" ISP count? (Score:3, Interesting)
My hardware matches the description of Internet Content Hosting Provider and Internet Email Provider, but the record-keeping portion of the bill refers to "Internet Service Provider" which I presume is defined elsewhere (not in this bill.)
*sigh*.
Re: Get the lawmakers to arrest themselves? (Score:3, Interesting)
Problem: "Attorney General Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, and e-mail conversations indefinitely."
Solution, from 3 stories down on Slashdot: "UK will start jailing the people who trade in email addresses, or any other personal data. The new regulations will result in a two year prison sentence for violating the Act."
Not counting the minor detail of countries involved, does anyone else read this as : "Attorney General Gonzales could be jailed for trading in email addresses and personal data"?
If you pass too many consecutive over-reaching laws, you eventually create something that convicts yourself. Unfortunately, Governments are above the law. I'd love to see a "consitututional crisis because the entire congress discovered it cast itself into jail".
The preview word for this post is victors.
Re:Oh, Congress won't pay for it. (Score:3, Interesting)
In my case, a whole lot. Because as soon as someone starts collecting IMs from my system, I'm going to set up a bot to entertain them. I think Chatterbot would like to read War and Peace. Then brush up on world events with the CIA World Factbook. And then maybe work the rest of the way through Project Gutenberg.
I'm not too worried about e-Mail, they already have to sort through all that SPAM. For the web, a crawler for firstgov.gov.
Not that I'm ashamed of reading
Re:Good luck (Score:3, Interesting)
ISP's keep logs anyway. When we get a subpoena from the feds for "any and all" logs related to a customer's usage, they know they're just going to get things like dhcp logs and mail server logs. On the *extremely* rare occasion where they require full blown network activity, they get a network trace dump. I remember one instance where the person's network traffic was fairly light, so the dump was a few hundred MB for a couple of days. While in another instance, we were required to trace someone's traffic for four or five days and it was almost 10 GB. 10 GB, for one single user's mail and web traffic.
Besides, I only had three, maybe four subpoenas for that level of monitoring in the last ten years, how badly do they really need this level of detail for *all* users on the internet?
Re:Good luck (Score:3, Interesting)