Republican Congressman Wants ISP’s To Keep Your Internet Surfing, Emailing Activity Indefinetly
A bill introduced to the US House of Representatives would require ISPs to record all users’ surfing activity, IM conversations and email traffic indefinitely.
The bill, dubbed the Safety Act by sponsor Lamar Smith, a republican congressman from Texas, would impose fines and a prison term of one year on ISPs which failed to keep full records.
“A crime is still a crime, whether it occurs on the street or on the internet,” said Congressman Smith.
“In this age of increasing digital and technological sophistication, cyber-crimes and cyber-terrorism pose a serious threat to the US. Law enforcement and the private sector must be prepared to deal with these crimes.”
The bill includes a separate clause that would force the owners of sexually explicit websites to include warning labels on their web pages, or face jail.
There are several problems with this.
First, who is going to bear the cost of storing all this data? Every email? Every instant message? Every visited website? That adds up to a tremendous amount of data to be stored by an internet service provider. Indefinitely too, and the cost of it all will be paid ultimately by we, the ISP’s customers. In order to remain profitable the ISP will have to transfer that expense to customers.
Second, is this even really necessary? Is law enforcement having a hard time gathering evidence of internet crimes currently? I don’t think they are. It seems to me that if law enforcement suspects some sort of crime happening involving a particular IP they can then request that the IP start saving records pertinent to the user in question. Which is what I believe law enforcement is doing already.
And what about privacy? Are not our emails and IM’s worthy of the same sort of privacy protections our physical mail and telephone conversations are? It seems to me as though asking ISP’s to keep a copy of all our emails is tantamount to the U.S. post office keeping a copy of all of our mail.
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