FBI Renews Push for ISP Data Retention Laws

mytrip brings us a news.com story about the FBI's efforts to make records of users' activities available to law enforcement for a much longer time. Several members of Congress also lent their support to the idea that such data retention should be mandatory for a period of up to 2 years. Quoting: "Based on the statements at Wednesday's hearing and previous calls for new laws in this area, the scope of a mandatory data retention law remains fuzzy. It could mean forcing companies to store data for two years about what Internet addresses are assigned to which customers (Comcast said in 2006 that it would be retaining those records for six months). Or it could be far more intrusive. It could mean keeping track of e-mail and instant messaging correspondents and what Web pages users visit. Some Democratic politicians have called for data retention laws to extend to domain name registries and Web hosting companies and even social networking sites."

That means phone calls too, right?

[badboy_tw2002]

Particularly the phone calls of our congressmen and presidents to lobbyists and such, top secret or not. As long as that provision is on the bill I'm fine with it because you know it will never ever ever get passed.

Clog those logs

[Teran9]

If web page requests are added to logging I'll start running an idle process on my router that crawls the web. I might just do that anyway.

democrats?

[TheGratefulNet]

Some Democratic politicians have called for data retention laws to extend to domain name registries and Web hosting companies and even social networking sites.

I thought we had established the republicans as the evil enemy.

you mean the democrats are also evil?

data retention is for spying. spying is ALWAYS a crime against man and fundamentally evil. data retention will come back to bite you, make no mistake about it. this is worrying (but sadly not unexpected).

still, no matter how bad it gets, it could only be worse in australia or england (I'm NOT kidding about that, either).

Sounds like a good idea to me

[phorm]

How about we start with the whitehouse? Remember all those missing emails?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, after all.

Re:I remember reading somewhere...

[AlHunt]

The only hope for taking our country back is to recompile our government from the source code and start again. Have you ever been at a point in a project where you just have to stop and reassess why you're doing things the way you are? Project America needs a serious rethink.

While we're at it...

[Jim Robinson Jr.]

let's implant GPS/RFID units in every man, woman and child so we can track movement, require positive ID for book and movie purchases, and mandate health-club memberships.

Yeah... life will be good as soon as our benevolent government can track and dictate everything we do. After all... it's for our own good.

NOT!

Seriously though, as soon as any government determines that every movement needs to be tracked in a virtual world, how quickly will that translate to the real world?

Bill of Rights...

[headkase]

Including the Bill of Rights as part of the Constitution was controversial at the time as some feared that it may come to be interpreted that the list would come to be seen as the only rights a Citizen possesed. The exact opposite is what was originally intended, the Federal government only has a small set of rights while Citizens are assumed to have unnumerated rights with the Bill of Rights as only listing a few. Under the Constitution it is not only their responsibility but even more importantly their duty to provide a conclusive and pressing need to curtail the Rights of the People of the United States of America when it comes to renegotiating the Rights and Freedoms of said Citizens. The anonymity of the original Federalist Papers strikes a chord here - this government sees people who are working for change as "homegrown terrorists". How ironic is the historical comparison to British rule over the Americas and those who oppose the status-quo with the Federal government today.

Re:I remember reading somewhere...

[Narpak]

Not a bad point as such. The current tangle of government (laws, regulations, bureaucracy and the election process) is the result of centuries of minor changes and adoptions (and some big ones). It is far from an optimal system and I think it would be prudent to actively research and debate improvements that could make the various aspects of nation management better and more democratic.

Laws should always be reasonable and solid, as it is, it seem to me, there are loopholes and cracks that can be exploited by anyone with the resources to do so. One of the fundamentals should always be to ensure that the system itself is running as well as it can; based on experience, research and citizen input.

Quis custodiet?

[brre]

Does this apply to the executive branch [google.com]?

Re:Clog those logs

[Anonymous Coward]

.

If web page requests are added to logging I'll start running an idle process on my router that crawls the web. I might just do that anyway

You might want to consider what could happen if your crawler accidentally landed on a page of kiddie porn.

The GP might actually have less of a chance of that happening via that method then the average Joe Sixpack opening email in the Outlook Malware Expresslane. The GP might even evoke a blacklist or simply use a whitelist set to random for the general purpose of massive log file generation while simply blackholing the results on his end.

This bill needs two riders, one to require the information to be stored into ISO approved OOXML format and another to delay its rollout till applications can generate it in OOXML. Maybe some congressional aide could take care of that, after all it worked for the RIAA and "works for hire".

Wonder how long after this goes into effect before some BOFH imitator decides to inact petty revenge by editing someone's records? Can the FBI take charge of data recovery if a drive fails?

Re:Such easy questions.

[element-o.p.]

Didn't this exact same load of crap happen about every 50 years ago or so? sed "s/communism/terrorism/g" and you've transformed McCarthyism to, for lack of a better term, Bushism.

how much room?

[Anonymous Coward]

The logs as of the other week on a 15,000 user forum averaged 3.5 gig every 3 or 4 days.

so that's a fresh 600gig HD for the 2 year mandate, for just one web site.