Post by Smurfette Principle on Jul 29, 2011 20:39:33 GMT -5
news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20084939-281/house-panel-approves-broadened-isp-snooping-bill/
thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.1981:
Personally, I see it as a phenomenal waste of resources, not to mention a ridiculous invasion of privacy. I also fail to see how cataloguing every citizen's Internet use protects children. IIRC, if a child goes online and finds something, then the one at fault is the website (which is why all websites require you to be over thirteen if you register with them, and require you to verify that you are eighteen if there's any questionable content). This law does absolutely nothing to address that.
And that's not even getting into how much farther this would put us in debt, what with the spending required to employ caretakers and IT people and bandwidth and storage...
thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.1981:
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."
Personally, I see it as a phenomenal waste of resources, not to mention a ridiculous invasion of privacy. I also fail to see how cataloguing every citizen's Internet use protects children. IIRC, if a child goes online and finds something, then the one at fault is the website (which is why all websites require you to be over thirteen if you register with them, and require you to verify that you are eighteen if there's any questionable content). This law does absolutely nothing to address that.
And that's not even getting into how much farther this would put us in debt, what with the spending required to employ caretakers and IT people and bandwidth and storage...