FBI Renews Push for ISP Data Retention Laws 179
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
Clog those logs (Score:4, Interesting)
democrats? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, after all.
Re:I remember reading somewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
While we're at it... (Score:2, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I remember reading somewhere... (Score:2, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Clog those logs (Score:1, Interesting)
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
how much room? (Score:1, Interesting)
so that's a fresh 600gig HD for the 2 year mandate, for just one web site.