This is horrifying:
Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.
The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.
A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.
It represents “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill.
Lofgren said the data retention requirements are easily avoided because they only apply to “commercial” providers. Criminals would simply go to libraries or Starbucks coffeehouses and use the Web anonymously, she said, while law-abiding Americans would have their activities recorded.
To make it politically difficult to oppose, proponents of the data retention requirements dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, even though the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.
“The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”
Once again, Democrats and Republicans unite to fight terrorism the drug war kiddie porn and in the process throw your privacy rights out the window. And while some Democrats put up token resistance, the damned bill was sponsored by none other than Debbie Wasserman Schultz. You know her as the chair to the DNC.
It’s really quite a disgusting piece of legislation, and it won’t do jack shit to stop child porn. It will, however, become a treasure trove of data for the Feds to do whatever the fuck that want to do with it, because after all, who doesn’t want to fight terrorism the drug war kiddie porn?
I can’t wait to see if the loudmouth “freedom” lovers in the tea party actually come out on the side of freedom. Although they are probably too focussed on keeping the Koch’s taxes low and making sure Michelle doesn’t have too many calories for lunch.
Samara Morgan
Assangian information theory predicts this.
America will become a police state on its way to non-linear system collapse.
The System is WAI.
beltane
“Freedom” to them only means the freedom of their tribe to bully and terrorize all other tribes. I suppose it will come in handy for the teabaggers to give their
propaganda ministerRoger Ailes full access to the data of The Enemies of Freedom.GregB
I am sure the tea-partiers will get right on board. Let’s not forget these nitwits who mouth platitudes about freedom were big supporters of torture, wiretapping and the ever growing intrusive police state tactics that were formulated post 9/11.
These so called lovers of the Constitution spent much of the last 10 years telling civil libertarians that:
The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Another brick in the wall on the way to a Big Brother style police state.
freelancer
You know what? I’ll bite…
WTF is “Assangian Info Theory”, you incoherent babbling moron?
Nemo_N
Scream CHILD-RAPE enough times and people will do whatever you tell them to do.
gocart mozart
Well, as long as it doesn’t effect the salt content of my chili fries or the inefficiency of my light bulbs, I fail to see what the big deal is.
c u n d gulag
In our soon to be Dominionist Christian Corporate States of America, our Job Creating Ministers, uhm, LEADER’S, will tell us, ‘Well, God knows everything, so why shouldn’t we, since we’re made in his image?’
We are sooooooooo fucked!
I’ll see you in the Gulag!
I’ll save you the lower berth.
Trentrunner
This is an important issue, to be sure.
But I think there’s something a teensy-weensy bit more important going on RIGHT THE FUCK NOW, isn’t there?
RandyH
Maybe it’s time to buy a secure PPTP hosting account so all my traffic goes securely through a far-away host and all gets annonymized. Not because of kiddy porn or anything like that but it’s just creepy that some pervert at DHS or FBI might review my particular taste in adult porn. That’s supposed to be private.
Also, too. They will quickly figure out that I am a Liberal Terrorist because I hang out at places like this. Now THAT is scary.
MattF
So, anyone in the government (or in that Burkean, Libertarian, etc., faction) who actually cares about ‘rights’, ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’ going to speak up against this? [Crickets]. Funny, that.
dr. bloor
Forget it, kiddies. The horses are all out of the barn now. This administration has no teeth, and the whole world knows it. Combing through ISP logs to identify potential Traitors to The State figures to be the least-offensive reaming we’re all going to take for the foreseeable future.
BD of MN
And how long before an ISP is hacked and every bit of that information “…customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers…” belongs to someone who shouldn’t have it?
Shouldn’t this also include a “hoocoodanode” tag/category?
CaseyL
RandyH – How difficult and expensive is it to do that?
MonkeyBoy
I thought the NSA was already doing this.
However one can’t really use the NSA data in a criminal or civil case because their capability to do so and what they collect is TOP SECRET.
This means that after the NSA finds “suspicious behavior” the NSA’s role can be sanitized by looking up the actual evidence in a legal database.
beltane
@BD of MN: Yes, underpaid federal employees will have every incentive to sell the information to anyone with cash. In other 3rd world countries, government employees work on “commission”; I expect ours will be forced into this as well. People have to eat, even government workers.
James E. Powell
Many years ago Dennis Kucinich, a very sharp political mind, told me that, “When they want your money, they say jobs; when they want your freedom, they say children.”
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
Gov’t small enough to infect your computer as a virus, huh?
eldorado
anybody seen cheney’s emails?
Samara Morgan
@freelancer: you can read this thread.
it has all the links.
Basically the continuing steady drip of the diplomatic cables is supposed to induce exponentially increasing paranoia security cost on classified data, which will eventually create an American Police State, which by its nature MUST be overthrown by a popular revolution.
This is also called the Doctrine of Hacktivism, or electronic civil disobedience, or the Electronic Intifada.
Tonal Crow
Once again, get on the horn and give your representatives hell. Then donate to the ACLU. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
gocart mozart
@beltane:
In the Tea-Baggers defense, how were they supposed to know that this was a good reason to stand up for “freedom/rugged individualism” without the proper orders from their masters?
Also, fuck half the democrats also.
aimai
Wow:
Thanks, James E. Powell. Kucinich may be a nut in a lot of ways but that’s an astoundingly brilliant line.
aimai
MikeJ
@c u n d gulag: This bill doesn’t really have anything to do with corporatism, but hey, don’t let reality stand in the way of some good slogans.
The ebbil corporations are the ones that will have to invest in tons of new infrastructure that doesn’t help them or their clients if this goes into effect.
Samara Morgan
aka Anonymous.
:)
security advocate
Nothing in this bill reduces your ‘freedom’ one iota. It doesn’t tell ISPs to block certain sites, or censor certain words, or take away internet access from anyone.
All it does is create a record of what you’ve done online. Police can monitor that record for evidence of criminal activity. Any law-abiding citizen has nothing to fear from such monitoring, because they don’t commit crimes in the first place.
Are you less ‘free’ because your credit card company has a record of the places you spend money? Of course not. It’s exactly the same principle. You lose freedom when someone takes something away from you, not by someone watching what you’re doing. ‘Privacy’ is not a constitutional right.
The CEOs of Facebook and Google have come out in favor of an end to Internet anonymity. This is the future. The ‘Wild West’/’Anonymous’ period of the Internet where anyone can do anything without facing the consequences of their actions needs to end. State governments need to be able to track online purchases by their citizens so that they can collect sales tax (as it is, brick-and-mortar realtors can’t compete with businesses like Amazon, which collect no sales taxes). People in the United States who work or start businesses online should have to prove their citizenship just like ordinary workers.
All this bill does is provide accountability for the actions of Internet users, but that is an excellent first step towards making the Internet part of the civilized world.
RandyH
@CaseyL:
I think it’s like $5 to $10 a month. They give you a private IP address on a server in a datacenter with an SSL cerificate assigned to it. You set up a PPTP tunnel to it and run your traffic through it (like a VPN setup.) You can buy them on servers in different parts of the US or in other countries. It’s popular with laptop traveler users who use public WiFi access points alot because it encrypts all of the traffic and routes it through a remote server that can’t be sniffed out locally. Also useful to appear to the sites you visit as being from another country if you choose a foreign server.
It’s been a while since I looked in to this and can’t remember any names of companies, but I may be looking for one soon if the panty-sniffers in our “Homeland Security” mob decide to violate everyone’s privacy.
Dennis SGMM
Of course a comprehensive database like the one described would never in any way be hacked or compromised. Since when did putting all of your eggs in one basket = security?
cs
Here’s a VPN to try. It’s run by the Pirate Bay people and is based in Sweden. It currently uses PPTP but there’s more secure protocols in beta and should be available soon.
I used to use one occasionally for torrenting and the speed hit isn’t that noticeable. As long as you could easily toggle it per connection, so Netflix goes through the normal US connection and all web traffic goes through the VPN, then it would be perfect.
Citizen_X
Are you fucking kidding me? This country is going to become the Land of Milk and Honey for criminal hackers if this thing passes.
MikeJ
Of the 25 cosponsors for the bill \, how many are dems? DWS and Deutch I recognize, who else?
What do you mean by token resistance? What are they supposed to do? And did you notice that *all* the people quoted as being against it are dems?
Yes, it would be nice if all the dems were on the side of good, but you can’t lose sight of the fact that all of the people on the side of good are dems.
John Cole
@security advocate: Go DIAF.
Shalimar
You shouldn’t bite. That will only get the Assange turned on.
Bill Arnold
@RandyH:
That is very interesting, thanks.
I wonder how governments (and ISPs) will react if this sort of encryption becomes mainstream, e.g. 10-20 percent of the traffic.
Citizen_X
@security advocate: Seriously: put up your name, address, and phone number or GTFO.
ETA: What John said, also, too.
beltane
All this bill does is provide accountability for the actions of Internet users, but that is an excellent first step towards making the Internet part of the civilized world.
Raenelle
Jeesh. I thought they were already doing this.
beltane
OT, but the Reid bill failed to get cloture. Now, even the most loyal Obots on GOS are freaking out about the POS “compromise” bill the President wants to inflict on us.
Loneoak
How could this possibly pass a 4th Amendment test? That isn’t a rhetorical question—does anyone with a better grasp of Constitutional law have some insights on that?
MikeJ
@Bill Arnold: If the datacenter is US based, either you or they will be responsible for keeping the logs of what requests come out of your server, even if those coming in are encrypted.
You could put your server offshore, but the places with good connectivity (like the EU) have had similar laws in place for years.
donr
Always interesting when the Republican Party and Chinese Communist Party have identical policy initiatives. Chinese right now are going one step further, requiring internet providers in public areas like cafes to install software that will personally identify each user of the network. The GOP has a little catching up to do.
gnomedad
Add a rider giving public access to the logs of everyone in Congress.
MikeJ
@Loneoak:
Because the gov isn’t searching the records without a warrant, merely requiring that records be kept. The government already requires record keeping for people like accountants. When they suspect wrongdoing, they go to a friendly judge and get a subpoena and then get the records. The record keeping requirement doesn’t violate the 4th.
trollhattan
The voice of totalitarianism, distilled to its purest most evil form.
Let’s have a contest to do the equivalent for Objectivism.
Loneoak
@security advocate:
What a stupid canard. Yes, the word ‘privacy’ does not appear in the Constitution. However, key elements of the modern concept of privacy are explicitly protected by the Constitution, and it has always been the case that certain rights accrue to citizens despite not being explicitly codified by the Constitution. Think about it for a second: do you truly believe that if a right is not enumerated specifically in the Constitution you do not have that right?
Edit: Also, much 20th Century jurisprudence read the Constitution to hold a right to privacy. And since the Supreme Court has the final say in interpretive matters, you can go suck an egg.
beltane
@Loneoak: You have forgotten that the Constitution is a quaint document. The sole right granted to you under the revised Constitution is the right to bear arms. All the rest has been delegated to the dustbin of history.
gnomedad
Also, invest now in anonymizing gateway providers. Or will they be made illegal?
cleek
@beltane:
how many House votes does the President get? zero?
JGabriel
CNet:
So, not only does the gov’t have access to this information — only with a warrant or whenever they want it? — but the ISPs collecting it can presumably do whatever they want with it.
Like, for instance, if News Corp. were to buy a controlling interest in a large ISP, they could snoop into anyone’s internet history with the excuse that they were required to keep the data?
And how much is that going to cost? Every single internet transaction and packet header stored on hard drive somewhere? How many terabytes per year per user? In my case it would be at least several hundred dollars of HD space, possibly several thousand — and you know the ISPs will be passing that cost onto the customers.
They ought to call this the Internet Forced Price Increase and Media Spying Act.
.
Amir_Khalid
@security advocate:
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
— Voldemort stooge Pius Thicknesse, Minister of Magic, justifying the crackdown on Muggle-borns in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows part 1
gocart mozart
@security advocate:
I assume you have never heard of the 4th Amendment. You should Google it some day, you might learn something.
Loneoak
@MikeJ:
Right, but the accountant’s records are related to a profession that requires public trust, whereas my rights to read and write whatever I want without intrusion are Constitutional rights of any citizen. Does that make a difference?
jrg
Shorter security advocate: “Giving me the right to search through your wife’s underwear drawer does not impede her ability to wear a thong in any way”.
Mind if I come over to your house and start rifling through your shit? Since that doesn’t impact your rights in any way?
trollhattan
Also, too, it’s an electronic colonoscopy, which is another step in the gummint takeover of our healthcare system.
RandyH
Whether what I am doing online is legal or not isn’t really relevant here. Of course someone could watch what I do online without my knowledge. They could also install a hidden camera in my shower and say “if you’re not doing anything illegal in that shower, you have nothing to hide.”
It’s still fucked up any way you look at it and I will do what I can to make it difficult for the panty-sniffing Perv’s at DHS and FBI to figure out what I do because it’s NONE OF THEIR DAMN BUSINESS.
James E. Powell
@Loneoak:
Americans willingly agreed to gut the fourth amendment in order to fight the War on Drugs. What was left after that was enthusiastically discarded to fight the War on Terror. The War on Kiddie Porn is just the fall-back.
MikeJ
@Loneoak: Not really from a 4th amendment perspective.
Keep in mind I think it’s a bad, bad, bad idea. I just don’t think it’s unconstitutional.
MeDrewNotYou
@trollhattan:
“I got mine, fuck you,” is my submission.
Mark S.
You’ll all be sorry when I’m gone!
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@MikeJ: Did you see the review of this book in the NYT today?
A Billion Wicked Thoughts
Two bold young neuroscientists have initiated a revolution in the scientific study of sexual attraction. Before Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, the only researcher to systematically investigate sexual desires was Alfred Kinsey, who surveyed 18,000 middle-class Caucasians in the 1950s. But Ogas and Gaddam have studied the secret sexual behavior of more than a hundred million men and women around the world. Their method? They observed what people do within the anonymity of the Internet.
Samara Morgan
@JGabriel:
they are prolly already doing it, its just classified.
Like wiretapping international calls.
The US gov has been doing that for 20+ years at least, ever since the speech recog algoriths got good enough for keyword detection.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@5 Except take down the RCC.
kay
@security advocate:
It’ll have horrible unintended consequences, just like all laws that are written in the hyper-emotional atmosphere of “protecting children” always do.
The child sexual predator laws are an absolute unmitigated disaster. Everyone already hates them. We’re going to have a huge class of people who can never work or live anything like a functional life again.
I have no idea why we’re doing this, and no one else does either. No one thought it through. Where were they going to work? Where were they going to live? What about juveniles, who can be charged with a sexually oriented offense for what is normal juvenile/juvenile sexual behavior and marked for life at 17? 25 year reporting periods. Lifetime reporting periods. It’s a life sentence. Judges are already working within the laws to mitigate the effects on juveniles (as much as they can).
The laws don’t make any sense.
You really need a calm and measured approach to laws designed to protect children. No screamers allowed.
It’s always been a precarious balance, their safety balanced against risk to them, balanced against the rights of adults. It’s really, really hard to get it right.
MikeJ
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): The book section is on the dining room table, awaiting my Sunday afternoon martini. Thanks for the pointer though, I will be sure to read that one.
Loneoak
Amphetamines, child rapists, and free markets are the cornerstones of a moral society. A=A.
Jules
THINK OF THE CHILDREN’S!!1111!!!!
The other good thing about having a VPN is if they have servers in the UK you’ll get a UK isp and then can watch BBC using iPlayer and itv and others.
Tunnel Bear was recommended and is free but I could not it to work for me.
http://www.tunnelbear.com/
The other free one I tried messed up my computer.
I’m using this:
http://www.ukproxyserver.co.uk/
and it is working great. But it does cost money.
suzanne
@James E. Powell: That just made my Facebook status.
I want some Wikileaks on the LDS church.
burnspbesq
@Loneoak:
Consent to this will be written into an amendment to your ISP’s TOS. You will be deemed to have consented.
AAA Bonds
This country seems less and less attractive every year.
Tsulagi
Oh, listen to the professional left. This is the centrist thing to do, an opportunity to show bipartisanship is still alive and well to eliminate any false sense of privacy you thought you had. Rs and Ds banding together as brothers to do battle with evildoer privacy in your life almost brings a tear to your eye.
@John Cole: I’d go with that. As security advocate would say, that would be “an excellent first step towards making the Internet part of the civilized world.”
AAA Bonds
@security advocate:
jesus this is master post
Ash Can
@security advocate: This is easily one of the stupidest fucking comments I’ve ever read on this site. Unless you were actually trying to be humorous, in which case you merely failed at that.
(Edited to fix typo)
burnspbesq
I guess I have to set up my new law firm’s Internet presence offshore and run it through an anonymyzer. I don’t know any other way I can make reasonable efforts to preserve the confidentiality of attorney-client communications, and I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to let these assholes wipe out the attorney-client privilege without acknowledging that that’s what they are trying to do.
Batocchio
@Nemo_N:
Unless it’s the Catholic Church.
tomvox1
@security advocate:
Nice of you to stop by, O’Brien.
gnomedad
Thanks for the VPN leads. I feel like I have a moral obligation to get one now.
handy
@kay:
What’s amazing to me is, in conversations I’ve had with “THINK OF THE CHILDREN” types about these laws, I’ve brought up the very questions you have. The answer is always, “Oh so you think it’s okay for perverts to bugger little kids, huh!”
Complete lack of critical thinking and all emotion. Which pretty much accounts for the motivation for a lot of laws on our books today.
she's crafty
@security advocate: Bullshit. It affects our freedom. We have the freedom to read what we want and think what we want without the government tracking us. This bill would save EVERYTHING for a year.
The FBI and NSA have long tried to force libraries and bookstores to turn over patron records, and they managed to add provisions to the USA PATRIOT Act to force libraries to respond to secret subpoenas that have penalties for disclosure to anyone, even a lawyer. A group of librarians in Connecticut fought that, and now the libraries can at least seek counsel when served with a subpoena for patron records.
But they’re now making sure they have nothing to turn over to the government by deleting records as soon as the item is returned. And why? Freedom of speech includes the freedom to read.
gnomedad
Since this is meme warfare, we need a catchy pushback nickname like the Internet Big Brother Bill.
Joel
I sense an uptick in RICK once this law is ratified.
celticdragonchick
@security advocate:
You need to speak up, dear. It is hard to understand what you are saying with that huge national security cock in your mouth.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
You are all firebaggers now.
.
.
security advocate
Hate on me all you like, but you know I’m right. You libertarian types, who obsess about freedoms you barely use(*), are pissing into the wind. Anonymity is coming to an end.
This legislation ensures that everything you do online can be traced, if necessary, back to the name by which you pay your ISP bill – that is, to your real name. Within five years, I predict, WordPress and standard forum software and most other venues for online communication will require you to log in with your real name through Facebook, or Google+, or some other verifiable social program, and we will see actual legal penalties for using a false name or alias on those programs. Within ten years, there will be no distinction between who you are on the Internet and who you are in real life, and no one will remember, or care, that it was ever anything else.
(*) When I say ‘barely use’, I probably exaggerate how often you actually use your so-called ‘freedoms’. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself two questions. One, when was the last time you did something online, anonymously, that you would not have done if it could be traced back to your real name? And two, was that action worthwhile, helpful, or beneficial to society? I sincerely doubt that anyone here has been publishing the new Federalist Papers in their spare time.
Roger Moore
@Nemo_N:
Unless you’re talking about a powerful religious institution.
celticdragonchick
@Loneoak:
Exactly what Madison was afraid of. He was sceptical of an enumerated Bill of Rights because idiots would assume that those were the only rights you had.
ZOMG! There is nothing in the Constitution about breathing air! I don’t have the right to breathe!
This is where the teatards are going, especially wrt public schools.
Barb (formerly Gex)
The STASI would be envious.
SiubhanDuinne
Well, we may be totally fucked, but as long as John Cole can come up with an awesome clever title like this one, I remain hopeful about the future.
Urza
Forget the hacking and loss of your real information. What if a hacker decided to change your data to make you look like the mythical child pornographer? Or islamic terrorist? And there wouldn’t be anything to contradict these records since the court would assume you wiped your personal computer clean but how could anyone change the records of the ISP (already well known as low security). Therefore you should be in Guantanomo with no appeals.
Said hackers could be working for the government of course which would make it even easier for them.
Stillwater
Yesterday I berated some firebaggers on another sight for thinking Dems were indistinguishable from Republicans. I need to go back over there and apologize.
jheartney
My favorite thing about security advocate is that while telling us not to worry our pretty heads about privacy, (s)he’s posting under a pseudonym.
Gunga Dean
Someone needs to say: “Obama wants to watch your keystrokes.”
That’ll make the Republicans kill it.
Roger Moore
@Loneoak:
I think this would probably pass muster because it’s theoretically about business records, not police procedure. The police would still have to follow existing rules about getting the data from ISPs, they’d just be guaranteed that the ISP records would be full of data to mine once they got them. If there’s a Fourth Amendment issue, it’s in the ease with which the police can troll through the records, and that ship has already sailed.
MikeJ
@Gunga Dean: It’s not actually watching keystrokes either, it’s just dhcp logs.
While I understand the value of lying in propaganda, I’m not in favor of engaging in it.
kay
@handy:
I don’t know. The sexual offender laws are pulling in an awful lot of people with ludicrous fact patterns. People are marrying their “perpetrator”. Weddings and everything. Something has gone terribly wrong here.
You know, this thing started as a “victim’s rights” movement and somehow we ended up completely ignoring the victim’s wishes. Which was inevitable, because the victim was never a party, although we’re pretending they are, as long as giving them fake-power helps the state.
It was always “state versus whomever”. It still is.
Disgruntled Lurker
I LOL’ed.
Also, where is this reply button I keep hearing so much about?
Peter
matoko_chan:
I’m pretty sure this has nothing to do with Assange. I am pretty sure of that because I can’t even remember the last time the dude made headlines. Nobody’s paying attention to him anymore, at least not until he pulls whatever his next stunt it.
Mike G
Hypothetical: “This new law requires 25. security advocate to have government-monitored cameras in all rooms of his house. All it does is create a record of what he does. Police can monitor that record for evidence of criminal activity. Any law-abiding citizen has nothing to fear from such monitoring, because they don’t commit crimes in the first place.”
a geek named Bob
All,
As ISP’s ALREADY have your address, connection, transactions, payment information, etc… why care about this new act?
After that digital listening post fracas in the early to mid 90’s, I’ve always assumed that every form of communication may be tapped.
For the most part, your rights are proportional to the level of legal and political power you can draw on. It’s not just or right, but that’s the way things are.
If you are worried about privacy – and I am – set up a way to obfuscate your digital tracks, and move on.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
Two points:
1) I think you’re overreacting. AFAIK, they’re requiring records of who connected to whom and when, but they’re not requiring ISPs to keep all of the contents of the communications. It’s like looking up a call history, not like a wiretap.
2) That said, you should be encrypting all your communications as a matter of course. Get PGP, GPG, or equivalent software and use it to encrypt all your email. If you aren’t doing that already, you aren’t taking every step you can to protect your communications.
Kyle
If it doesn’t involve guns, taxes, lightbulbs or renaming french fries in a crybaby fit of jingoistic pique, then it doesn’t count as ‘freedom’.
Besides, how would President Bachmann’s DOJ round up visitors to liberal blogsites without it?
Maybe if you convince them that black people are somehow getting a better deal than teatards from this legislation.
MikeJ
@Mike G:
It doesn’t even do that. It requires them to keep track of who had which IP address when. They still need the other end of the connection to know which IP address to care about. They could get that from busting a web site or an IM sting operation, but this bill doesn’t require the ISP to monitor the traffic or where it went.
No, it’s not good, but it isn’t what people are claiming.
gocart mozart
@kay:
Its basic political cowardice. People who should know better don’t vote against it because they are afraid of the 30 sec. ad that says “Rep. Jones voted to protect pedophiles blah blah blah.”
AAA Bonds
@Roger Moore:
All of the things he suggested are good ideas anyway.
Ben
Do a goole search on TOR, download it and use it with your Mozilla Firefox browser. Let them try to follow your activity that way.
Jennifer
@JGabriel: I want to know the answer to that, too. They’re going to invade your privacy, and pass the cost increases along to you as well.
AAA Bonds
@Peter:
In the sense they were going to fuck us anyway, sure.
In the sense that it’s designed to put private companies in charge of gathering information on citizens for future police investigation of any suspected online wrongdoing, it’s got a ton to do with Assange and all future struggles for the citizen over the security state.
emdee
OK, I hate being a wet blanket in this heat, but there’s an important leap of logic going on here:
I am not addressing the serious consequences of keeping your billing information in “one place,” because that’s not really my thing. There’s no reason an ISP would have to keep all that in “one place” anyway — the billing info could be kept as securely as they do now (I do not recall an instance of an ISP being hacked for payment information but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen) and tie the IP addresses to just an opaque 32-digit “customer number” or other ID. That’s a different discussion.
My problem is that in all linked articles about this bill, I read only what I read above: it requires keeping records that tie billing info to whatever IP addresses you’re assigned. If you’re on broadband at home, you probably don’t change IP addresses very often. Mobile users do, and dial-up users do, but broadband does less often. Static IP customers never change theirs, as that’s what “static” means. In that case, this bill becomes a no-op; the ISP already knows how long you had your IP address.
But it’s the IP addresses, not activity. None of the articles mention activity except for opponents saying it’s tracking activity, but they don’t say how. To make the overused telephone analogy, this is not requiring that they keep a log of all the calls you made—it’s requiring that they keep a record of what phone numbers you had.
To match that to activity, they’d then have to have other logs (like server logs) that show your IP address in use on a particular site at a particular time. Law enforcement would argue something like this: “We found a kiddie porn site and obtained its logs, but all the IP addresses in the logs were temporary ones that are no longer active. With this law, we’d be able to go back to the ISPs who assign those IPs and find out who was using those IP addresses when those addresses were accessing this server.” But without the kiddie porn server’s log, they wouldn’t know what IP addresses to ask for.
This would indeed be a boon for groups like the RIAA who want to sue people who may have shared a song online but can’t get any info about who was using an IP address several months ago. Basically, if anyone who can get access to these databases has information that a given IP address accessed a given server at a specific time, they can go back and find out who had that IP address at that time. @RandyH is right (AFAIK) that the only solution to this would be tunneling all your IP traffic through a distant server, so the IP address that shows up in the server’s logs belongs to the tunnel, not to you—but if the tunnel provider can have its records subpoenaed, then the information is still available.
These are all legit problems, but I can’t find anything that says ISPs have to record your end of your traffic. They’d have to record “John Cole had IP address A.B.C.D on July 31, 2011,” but not everything (or anything) that IP address A.B.C.D actually did that day. They’d have to have some other information, from the other end (like an alleged kiddie porn server) that says “I was visited on July 31 by address A.B.C.D” to know to go to the ISP and ask “Who had that address on July 31?”
And that’s still arguably a big deal, don’t get me wrong. But if you argue “ZOMG THEY’RE TRACKING ME WITH SATELLITES” it’s just wasting time on an argument that’s going to get shot down. Focus on the right fight.
AAA Bonds
@a geek named Bob:
Easy: because it limits the market. If this goes into law no one will have the option of offering a service that doesn’t act as a direct extension of the security state.
cleek
@MikeJ:
no, sorry. the narrative has been established.
gocart mozart
Obama should come out and strongly support this law thus making it another step in the imposition of his Marxist caliphate. Wolverines Are Go!
craigie
Wait, I’m confused. Shockingly, these conservatives don’t seem to be consistent. Aren’t these the same people who want all gun sale records destroyed? How is this going to work – they store all the sites you visit, except gun stores? They store all your online purchases, except the gun-related ones?
Methinks the right hand does not know what the ultra-right hand is doing.
Lysana
Bullshit.
ISPs (grammar pedant notes you do NOT use an apostrophe to make that acronym plural) do not keep those on record. They don’t have the storage capacity. It’s also currently illegal for them to do so.
You also fail to see the difference between “tapped” and “stored for any bozo with hacking skills to find.”
And speaking as someone who’s actually worked in more than one area of the online industry over time, another area this bill wil completely bugger over is e-commerce. Secure web pages will not be able to be secure if you are using a US-based ISP. The protection provided by the https protocol will violate your ISP’s ability to store your data. Therefore, the hackers won’t need to attack the storage records. They will be able to set up packet sniffers and the rest will be like harvesting falling apples.
Bill Murray
@security advocate:
This is my favorite part. The CEOs of two companies that want to know your personal information to make more money for themselves are in favor of ending your ability to hide your personal information from them.
celticdragonchick
@Disgruntled Lurker:
It is in the far right lower corner. You have to poke around to find it. Thanks for the laughter! :) We all need it…
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
a geek named Bob @96
Or, as it was eloquently put, buried in the novel Catch-22: “They have a right to do anything you can’t stop them from doing.”
I always loved this twist. It’s not that they CAN do anything, it’s that they have the RIGHT to do anything.
Dollared
@security advocate: Yes, “Mr. Citizen, I notice that you have a pattern or checking “Maxim Girls” between 11 and 12pm. Are you sure you want to cancel your contract? Can we check your wife for confirmation of your cancellation”
Of course, you’ve done nothing illegal…
“The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that Citizen Jones, who is shop steward of his National Education Association Unit, appeared to be an ordinary antiwar activist, but according to unnamed Wisconsin State Police sources, he read Al-Jazeera news of Iraq every night during the 11 days between the anti-Republican demonstration where his facial image was recorded and the night of his capture and arrest. Al-Jazeera, it is alleged by some sources, sends coded signals to operatives in its broadcasts.”
Handsome Stranger
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
Is that really from Harry Potter? It’s almost identical to a line from a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits:
“People with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from O.B.I.T.”
The episode in question concerns the government of the United States spying on scientists working at one of its research facilities.
Frankensteinbeck
@kay:
I really care about this stuff. The ‘for the children!’ arguments in this country are asinine and destructive. Our culture has a really seriously deranged hypersensitivity to issues about children, and like all hypersensitivities it’s utterly misplaced. People yell and scream about corrupting the youth and guarding children from predators and Gorilla Grod knows what all, but the truth is that the people who hurt children are their parents. The people who have sex with children are their parents. The people who kill children are their parents. The people who kidnap children are their parents. The people who teach children bad values are their parents. For the ones there that are trackable crimes, it’s something like 90% by the parent or guardian. Our society wants to blame anyone and anything except bad parents.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@craigie:
Heh.
Those of us getting fisted by the right are too aware of what those hands are doing. Although security lemming seems to enjoy the lubeless fisting.
UncommonSense
You’re missing the point, John. This is really a jobs bill.
This will create lots and lots of jobs, because… um… uh…
Yutsano
@UncommonSense:
Finished that for you.
Also: new thread naow plz?
stinkdaddy
@cleek: So you’re fine with having your CC#, bank info, etc. sitting around a server for some hacker to make off with? My ISP doesn’t currently have any of those. I think you may be projecting a bit as you try to establish your own narrative that the bill’s no big deal.
There are serious problems here, and pulling out the usual “neener neener firebaggers are spooked by shadows” bullshit doesn’t change that, despite your smug sense of self-satisfaction.
Valdivia
@Yutsano:
yes can we have new thread please? Even if reading about the real world today is giving me aggro, as the Brits say.
stinkdaddy
By the way, the folks trying to lean on the “but some dems are against this!” line ought to look up Biden’s connections to the RIAA. We ought to have learned by now that some Dems saying nice words about a horrible piece of legislation doesn’t mean dick in the end.
Southern Beale
So apparently we have a deal, according to CNN? People on the Twittahz are saying it’s worse than default. Honestly, I have no idea what’s even IN the bill. But Reid’s plan couldn’t withstand a GOP filibuster so WTF?
Honestly I don’t know what’s going to become of us. This whole thing just proves how hopelessly broken our entire system is.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Southern Beale
Hang tough, it’s all bullshit.
William Hurley
Welcome to one of the inevitable, unavoidable realities of the internet.
The various commercial and governmental assaults on Enlightenment notions of Liberty, individualism, privacy and ownership are undertaken to destroy these obstructions to capital, asset and personal (meaning, your body) confiscatory prerogatives as defined by the confiscators.
The “web” is a natural facility through which the exercise of control can be asserted quietly, automatically and with little challenge. Consider it to be the resurrection of the Baojia system at lightspeed. Have you registered today? Or, more accurately, are you aware that your activities have been registered today, just as they were yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, …
Southern Beale
@UncommonSense:
There I finished it. { head –> desk }
Frankensteinbeck
@Southern Beale:
Wait and see what’s in the bill. I heard a first rumor there was a deal this morning, accompanied by a lengthy screed about how Obama had betrayed us, because… the writer just assumed he’d given the GOP everything. Instantly. He didn’t know what was in the deal, he just assumed the worst. Wait and see, and remember that the devil will be in the details. Hell, wait and see if anything passes at all.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Frankensteinbeck
And then wait and see what happens next time the Bush tax cuts come up.
Liberty60
@MattF:
Well once Fonzi takes care of the horrors of funeral parlor licensing and nail salon regulations, he will get right on this, I am sure.
Frankensteinbeck
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Heck, if he traded a tax cut extension for a harmless raise to the debt ceiling, I’m fine with that. The tax cuts should be closed, but right now it’s the thing I’m most willing to trade. Same as I didn’t mind trading it for a 13 month social security insurance extension, the repeal of DADT, and a few other bennies thrown in.
Corner Stone
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Honest question. What do you think?
Trollenschlongen
Can’t wait to read thru this thread later when I have time to find out how the Dem activists/enablers here are going to rationalize this one.
Should be fun! :D
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Corner Stone
He’ll proly cave. . .
cleek
@stinkdaddy:
it already is. on so many servers i can’t even count. every on-line store that keeps my CC has all that stuff. every utility and auto-payment merchant i deal with has it. my ISP has it, too, because they do automatic payments.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Bill Murray:
This is why I will never have a Facebook page or use Google products/anything, they only care about getting their hands on your personal information so they can profit from it.
I walk around daily and I see people everywhere. I have no idea who those people are, nor do I care to know since I am minding my own business. Everyone is ‘anonymous’ unless I already know them, just like it is on the internet.
Fuck Facebook and fuck Google. Fuck them with the rustiest gardening implements available. Repeatedly.
Mike S
Dear SecAdv
I would like to think the 9th Amendment applies.
So Mind your own business!
karen marie
@Peter: Where’s the rumored “huge” release of BoA stuff?
I was promised a bank takedown and all I got was this lousy cup of coffee.
bemused
I think the deal will be a stinky sandwich. The House Republicans are using a similar playbook as MNGOP did all the way up to the MN shutdown, throw their pet policies and cuts with no tax increases on the wealthy into every deal they offered in budget talks. After the shutdown, the MNGOP didn’t bother to even try to resume talking, crickets, and Gov Dayton said he heard they were planning to come back with even more and worse of the same crap and he knew they would never budge. They don’t retreat, just push for more and more. He stopped the shutdown before even more damage was done to the state and was able to keep some good things in.
Martin
Horrifying? This is Google by legislation. They have all that information and more. How do you think they know to serve me up an ad about power tools on this page if they didn’t know that on a different computer, using a different browser, I was shopping for a new router last week?
Morbo
Our only hope is Ron Paul.
Who of course will pander on it for campaign contributions from outraged college students only to miss the vote while plugging his new book.
pete
Two things: 1. Yes, this is an incremental step and I understand the logic of those who say it’s not a significant change. But IMHO things in this area have been terrible for a long, long time and the fact that they have been bad for decades (I have had email and been on listserves since the mid-80s myself, and I wasn’t all that early) just means that some of you have apparently got used to it. But not everyone knows about it. Which leads me to: 2. Politically this may be the small step that goes over a big bright scary line and alerts people. I certainly hope so.
There is recent precedent, in the Murdoch phone bugging: It was widely known to happen, at least in Britain, and the Millie Dowler news was pretty much ho-hum to folks who had been paying attention — but the wider reaction was … powerful.
B
Nice to see the Republicans sticking to their ‘small government’ beliefs.
Fucking hypocrites.
Yes, I know the spineless Dems went along with this (no surprise. They have no balls and willingly bend over to take it in the ass from the Repubs. Even when they are the ones in control), but they are not the ones screeching about government intrusion is evil, and that the government needs to be drowned in the bathtub.
HeartlandLiberal
Many of my former colleagues (I just retired from an almost 30 year career in IT), laugh when I tell them I, unlike them, am not interested in putting any of my data or apps in the cloud. Trust Microsoft server farms with my data? Amazon? Google? I don’t think so.
In fact, I run my own web server with multiple virtual domains ( I can have a new domain with DNS propagating up and running in about 15 minutes), email server, development server, and domain controller with backup arrays of drives.
So I guess that kind of moots being spied on by my ISP, since I am, pretty much, my own ISP.
And these hypocritical Republicans and their police state will just have to pry my logs out of my cold etc hands. Know what I meant?
By the way, what is with the complete logical disconnect of the right wing and the so-called Tea Party idiots? Those who scream loudest about government being too big and dangerous are the very ones who for the past 12 years have eroded my civil liberties and the Constitution and Bill of Rights until they are pretty much dead. Defunct. Forgotten. Toast. History. Dustbin of.
Sloegin
@security advocate: Guess you won’t mind then when the LEOs come to arrest you because a bot or virus bounced one of your browser clicks to an illegal website. You’ve got nothing to worry about eh? Just explain it to the nice officers.
joel hanes, sp4
@security advocate:
And you think this will be a good thing.
I tell you that there is no escaping the Law of Unintended Consequences, and that the “accountability” that you so gleefully anticipate will be most used, not as the bill’s framers intend, but rather to preserve the power of those already in power, to suppress investigation of those who would expose the crimes of the powerful, and to prevent and counter the exercise of other rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of association.
For my legal arguments, I refer you to the reply made in the case Arkell v Pressdram.
MikeJ
@HeartlandLiberal:
Which means that they will be able to bust you for not retaining data.
Wazmo
Feh! betcha Ruppert’s trolls are going to buy bunchies of WASPs (Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform-a modified Air Force drone with a wiFi and GSM cracker/recorder onboard.)
the builders will be at DEFCON 19
Pococurante
I work for a retailer. We already keep this information on file. Privacy law area spells out how your personal information (PCI and PII) is stored and transmitted. Those laws would apply to the ISPs as well.
The consumer Me is not all that thrilled with this bill or the activity of entities like my employer. But IT Me is not all that concerned either. There’s nothing going on in this new legislation that doesn’t already occur by other entities.
Google is particularly good at aggregating this type of info already, by enticing us to give it away for free software.
bemused senior
It looks to me like this legislation is just extending the current practice from 3 months to 1 year. ISPs already retain your assigned IP address for a period of time to do trouble-shooting and address billing disputes. As has been stated upstream, this law hasn’t got anything to do with retaining a record of your traffic or even the ip addresses you have connected to.
LanceThruster
PLEASE do NOT create a police state on my account.
LanceThruster
@LanceThruster: Too late!