Posted on 09/20/2006 9:52:11 AM PDT by Froufrou
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that Congress should require Internet providers to preserve customer records, asserting that prosecutors need them to fight child pornography.
Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller have met with several Internet providers, including Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Comcast Corp., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc.
The law enforcement officials have indicated to the companies they must retain customer records, possibly for two years. The companies have discussed strengthening their retention periods - which currently run the gamut from a few days to about a year - to help avoid legislation.
During those meetings, which took place earlier this summer, Justice Department officials asserted that customer records would help them investigate child pornography cases. But the FBI also said during the meetings that such records would help their terrorism investigations, said one person who attended the meetings but spoke on condition of anonymity because the meetings were intended to be private.
Testifying to a Senate panel, Gonzales acknowledged the concerns of some company executives who say legislation might be overly intrusive and encroach on customers' privacy rights. But he said the growing threat of child pornography over the Internet was too great.
"This is a problem that requires federal legislation," Gonzales told the Senate Banking Committee. "We need information. Information helps us makes cases."
He called the government's lack of access to customer data the biggest obstacle to deterring child porn.
"We have to find a way for Internet service providers to retain information for a period of time so we can go back with a legal process to get them," he said.
At Tuesday's hearing, Gonzales said he agreed with the sentiment of 49 state attorneys general who in a June letter to Congress expressed support for a federal law that would require longer retention of customer records.
"We respect civil liberties, but we have to harmonize this so we can get more information," he said.
The subject has prompted some alarm among Internet service provider executives and civil liberties groups after the Justice Department took Google to court earlier this year to force it to turn over information on customer searches. Civil liberties groups also have sued Verizon and other telephone companies, alleging that they are working with the government to provide information without search warrants on subscriber calling records.
Justice Department officials have said that any proposal would not call for the content of communications to be preserved and would keep the information in the companies' hands. The data could be obtained by the government through a subpoena or other lawful process.
Gonzales is a bum.
I guess this will make it easier for Hillary to prosecute Freepers if she becomes Dictator of the USA.
It's for the children!.............really!.....you can trust me!.........fer shure!......
Every new encroachment on personal liberty and privacy always has an altruistic face.
Wonder what the government will make of my constant back and forth among Free Republic, the Drudge Report, Ebay and Craigslist?
Only if we get those 500 F.B.I. files....from the Clinton's
WHAT records? billing data? That won't tell them squat. And don't tell me that any ISP can keep track of ALL surfing/e-mail/bittorrent activity indefinitely (well, they might if their client list is not terribly large). Damn control freaks.
I'm surmising they want to keep the mappings of customer account numbers to DHCP and static IP addresses.
Of course the porn freaks will get around that with proxies.
But, it's the people with that face who make the encroachments necessary.
ping
I can't support this.
if the FBI wants to find online child porn - let the agents do searches themselves, subscribe to sites that host it, and then when they see the material - bust those sites and shut down their hosts. its easy. look how many online predators DateLine NBC was able to find on their own with sting operations - an endless parade of them.
True. I'd say the AG wants to keep a foot in the door for W on the wiretapping issues...this sort of fits [sideways?]
Once you start collecting...its like the Rico act...it just gets twisted, and alot of folks get hauled into court that had nothing to do with smut. The amusing thing...is that it'll be the IRS that likely uses this the most...tracking folks who sell via the internet and avoid reporting income. I know several folks now, who make between $20k and $40k...via the internet, and they report about half of their income at best.
I suspect it is just account / billing data. Still, this is a massive change to business process and will be costly.
I'm guessing when they go through the web logs of a kiddie porn site, they want to trace back the visitor IPs.
ISP's don't generally keep logs of which customers have been mapped to which (DHCP) IP address, so this is probably what they're hoping to get.
The records would show the link between web visitor IPs and IPs provided to ISP customer accounts.
the "wiretapping" issue involves calls made to foreign countries, and it has in fact been part of NSA's protocols for decades.
Who does this guy think he is, Judge Dredd?
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