Forum Moderators: phranque
WASHINGTON--Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday stepped up his efforts to lobby for federal laws requiring Internet providers to keep track of what their customers do online.Gonzales asked senators to adopt "data retention" legislation that would likely force Internet providers to keep customer logs for at least a year or two. Those logs, often routinely discarded after a few months, are intended to be used by police investigating crimes.
Gonzales: ISPs Must Keep Records On Users [news.com.com]
How could a hosting company be called "Internet Service Provider"?
Read it aloud : "Internet Service Provider".
The one that "Provides" you with "Internet Service".-fischermx
You are missing the point. An ISP's records would be useless in regards to showing illegal, (unAmerican, unPatriotic, Evil-doing), activities --- unless the entries in the logs demonstrate that the ISP's customer has done more than connected to the internet.
Suspected illegal / suspicious / evil-doing activities would occur using SMTP, FTP, HTTP and other TCP/IP based tools, which would result in the need to save copies of all email and email server logs, records of all FTP activity including casual directory browsers and specific file transfers (inluding file renaming, updating / overwriting, etc), then the logs of every web server along with copies of the content the logs refer to archived at the time of the log entry.
The web server logs need to log every hit on every bit and pixel --- lest some super-hacker figures out that they can encode secret messages in an embedded SVG object in a framed page from a redirected URL and hide out in Wyoming selling black market porcupine meat while appearing to be a schoolgirl from Baltimore doing social studies homework.
"...And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'..."- Orwell
This is not about catching criminals, it's about invading privacy to build up a scenario where either fake evidence can be created or 'political undesirables' can be messed around with and 're-educated'.
It's pure Orwell and cannot be justified as anything else but spying on the people in the same manner as the KGB.
If someone is actually doing something wrong on your site you don't need to go back 2 years to find out. This is about profiling and looking for exploitable weaknesses.
Let's not forget Gonzales is the same chap that claimed torture of suspects is fine as long as Bush sez so. I think it is now beyond party politics to point out the Bush adminastration has way over-stepped the bounds of decency, honesty and bluntly, neo-fascism.
Strikes me that the real issue here is not so much that they're spying on you, they do that anyway, but now they're forcing private companies to assist them, as carnivore can't cope?
P
That pretty much says it all.
What happened to the great democracy?
Who is to say who was using the computer at that moment... oh I forgot..... that is what the camera's will be for. Silly me.
What in the heck does that have to do with the topics?
Laws can be passed in a very limited scope, and that scope eventually creeps. Once a general idea (with a limited scope) is accepted, it's much easier to widen the scope. Income tax history is just an easy example.
I see the response to this matter coming in the form of answers to two separate questions:• How will this affect your wallet?
• How will this affect your net usage?
Does anyone still remember the word: "Freedom"?
incrediBILL:
Does this mean they're going to outlaw anonymous proxy servers and install blocks to those outside the US?If not, this whole excercise is completely meaningless.
It doesn't matter where you look for info, in this case.
Your ISP is still the last in chain, who transmits the data to your real IP and can keep the track of it.
It's only the data provider (website/web server) you could fool with a proxy.
