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."

There is no privacy on Internet anyway

[iamacat]

All your data is transfered unencrypted and, with Web 2.0 "revolution", on servers accessible to outsourced personal in jurisdictions with questionable privacy laws. I hope this is a wake up call for widespread adoption of IPSec/SSL and return to hosting content on your own machine, like it was meant to be at inception of Internet and World Wide Web. Opportunistic encryption solutions can exchange public keys with assumption of trust during the first communication between two given users. Law enforcement or black hats who start to listen in later will not get much once your circle of online friends is established.

Re:Double Standard

[BenJCarter]

The administration is Republican. The article says this bill is sponsored by Democrats.

Re:not that troubling

[H3lldr0p]

You didn't happen to see where the SCotUSA decided that doesn't apply anymore today, did you?

From yahoo [yahoo.com].

Re:not that troubling

[element-o.p.]

Riiiiight. And the FBI hasn't been caught improperly issuing National Security Letters recently ahref=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/washington/25justice.htmlrel=url2html-11383 [slashdot.org]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/washington/25justice.html>. And the NSA hasn't conducted domestic wiretapping in violation of the 4th amendment http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm [usatoday.com]. And the executive branch hasn't claimed that the right to a writ of habeas corpus is not granted by the Constitution http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2007/011907Parry.shtml [baltimorechronicle.com]

Not to be rude, but do you believe in the tooth fairy, too?

Re:That means phone calls too, right?

[nihongomanabu]

There's already law [wikipedia.org] on the books saying that presidential email are public record and need to be preserved. However, the current administration seems to have *forgotten* this little fact.