This is like the “no anonymity” on the web campaign which is pushed as being anti-bullying, anti-predator, revenue enhancing (Facebook and other websites), etc, but would have the real effect of discouraging people who might be afraid of retribution if they say something online someone in power doesn’t like.
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.
[…]
“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.”
“A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customersâ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and…”
Great!
One-stop-shopping for identity thieves.
I’m surprised they aren’t required to keep a copy of my SSN and mother’s maiden name. đ
vpn
win
Why do Republicans hate America?
They Hate us for our freedom… wait a sec…
We need the nerds to save us!
(OK, I’m a broken record on this issue.)
All our Internet tools need full encryption and anonymity built in by default so that the ISP (or IT department, or government) have no idea where you are surfing or what you are doing.
Microsoft and Apple are not going to do this for us, so we need privacy activists to build in these feaure
C’mon nerds! We need you to save the world! You are the only ones who save us from e-Fascism.
Great, Newt Gingrich will now know every Japanese porn site I visit … because he’ll be visiting them for me. (What can I say? I love little yellow women.)
Spoofing an address is trivial.
Responding to a spoofed address instead of the original device is trivial.
There’s nothing to grabbing hold of a stream, disappearing the packets off the net, and redirecting it, or cloning it and redirecting it, like the NSA does to AT&T’s data stream going overseas. (I can surf and make it look like its coming from a print server from a distant Kinkos…)
Rep. John Conyers is right, this is just a money grab by the hard drive manufacturers and/or some parallel processing kit in some Republican congress critter’s district.
Its is going to pile up tons of data, (not knowledge, not even information, just data,) without ever indexing them, spawning a job for people like me to go through all of this huge mountain of data looking for a needle in a whole bunch of proverbial haystacks.
Database geeks like me have tools to do some amazing analysis but its going to demand processing on a massive scale, and massively parallel processors running some pretty simple queries over massively distributed databases to turn up stuff that Kevin Mitnick could find out much more easily and much more reliably. (The data being kept isn’t quite enough to build a trustworthy and sufficiently broad relationship graph, specially if the IP addresses can be spoofed.)
Aren’t Web Anonymizer services anonymous ONLY because they don’t keep records? And now they will have to. So, anonymous until the government wants to know who you are. I didn’t think it would last for long. Too artificial, too easy to stop.
You can’t have a tube running into your house that gets filled at the other end and not have whats in the tube known by every handler of the tube.
The Right to Privacy verses the Desire to be Anonymous. An unavoidable tension. I think we should have a right to privacy in our homes and private conversations within our homes, but I’ve never really understood why that should extend to telephone conversations. Thats more like yelling out your window to your neighbor to me==no expectation of privacy. I’m talking about “natural rights.” Seems to me we can extend privacy rights as we will: to phone calls, to internet usage all as we wish.
Of course, the only privacy we have is in our own thoughts. After that, it is hubris to think we are private at all.
Always with pro’s and con’s to all we do.
In # 5 GregAllen said: Microsoft and Apple are not going to do this for us…
Nor do they have to.
TCI/IP is a seven layer stack from the physical transport layer to the application transport layer.
If we want end-to-end encryption its easy to arrange it ourselves. (Its not simple but its not difficult.)
That’s what all the international criminals did years ago.
All important military communications are 100% encrypted (and take huge computers at the NSA some time to crack. [you have to prioritize. Your potential kiddy porn habit aint worth it when compared to North Korean intercepts.])
Biased … “Republicans” in article used as excuse but guess who will sign this gladly, without flinch- Obama Administration.
This is yet another proof that we have problem with PROGRESSIVES on both sides, Left and Right. They got established in power. They live of the laws like this.
Elect Left or Right person of your choice but NOT Progressives. Nowadays they are mostly open who they are as they are in power.
#7 You might want to check out how Tor works though I wouldn’t count on anything.
This is most likely going to be most useful for running down people who have visited what turns out to have been a disapproved web site that the thought police didn’t know they disapproved off till later.
The major flaw is a sharp person would hide a disapproved site behind a mundane site so that most of the traffic was third parties that aren’t going to have a clue why they just got arrested and had their computers seized. Just for fun use compromised computers to jump through a couple of jurisdictions.
Several guys were still nailed a few years back who did all that by a guy who found a tad of unexplained activity on his university computer and ran down the fact that were going after Fed gov. computers and where they were sending from. I think it was eastern Germany.
Simply evil. There is no justification for this action.
Who cares. Let do what they want. They can’t arrest everyone. Their Nazi behavior will eventually find a backlash from the multitude.
Hmm, what if I run my own DNS? I know the ISP can do deep packet inspection, but is it really worth it?
If I were an ISP, I would comply by having the log redirected to a dot matrix printer in an ill-lit basement. If the government wants to take a look, they are welcome to wade through piles of printouts.
This makes renting a seedbox and buying anonymous debit cards with cash almost seem worth it.
“Total Information Awareness” – that what the CIA SPOOK called it !!! We TRACK YOUR EVERY MOVE, EVERY KEYSTROKE, EVERY PURCHASE, EVERY PICTURE YOU VIEW, EVERY TIME YOU SCRATCH YOUR ASS !!!
Anti-TIA Tip – Put electrical tape over your web cam and micropphone !!!
Soon we’ll have to VPN stuff through China.. The US was the go-to place for us in Europe after the EU started pushing this kind of shit down on us.
I thought that the content of telegrams was private in Austria! – Captain Von Trappe
>> # 8 msbpodcast said, on July 28th, 2011 at 7:59 pm
>> If we want end-to-end encryption its easy to arrange it ourselves. (Its not simple but its not difficult.)
I’m sure it’s easy — but it has to be by default. We can’t expect the average user to set up TOR or use an anonymity.
By the way, it has to be more than encrypted. It has to be anonymous to the ISP.
I lived in Dubai where everyone in the whole country is tracked. Even if it is encrypted, the government could bust you just for going to certain sites. They were aware of proxy servers and blocked those.
I got around it by setting up my own personal proxy server in the US at my brother house. (Actually, he did it, and said it was a big hassle.) But I used it sparingly since I didn’t want the government to notice what I as doing.
And, in case you are wondering, I wasn’t using it for porn or crime. The UAE will block sites for the most arbitrary and ridiculous reasons — even major US newspapers.
#13 Keeping track of what addresses your are running by DNS isn’t an indication that you actually visited the site, so that information isn’t interesting. The actual IP addresses of the site you do visit is found in the IP packet header, so “deep packet inspection” is not required.
And no ISP wants to collect logs that aren’t of use to it for troubleshooting. The Feds have attempted to pass laws requiring massive data storage requirements, but prefer to pass the costs of doing so on to the businesses so regulated (see SOX, GLB, etc).
These ‘tards don’t have the wits to look at the data from the cameras at the pentagon from 9/11/2001 and find out the real story behind the attack. If they don’t do that soon they’re going to miss the 10th anniversary and will look like they are slow.