Posted on 06/17/2005 6:29:41 AM PDT by rattrap
The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers' online activities.
Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs--that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept.
In theory, at least, data retention could permit successful criminal and terrorism prosecutions that otherwise would have failed because of insufficient evidence. But privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior have caused a similar proposal to stall in Europe and could engender stiff opposition domestically.
News.context
What's new:
The U.S. Department of Justice is mulling data retention rules that could permit police to obtain records of e-mail, browsing or chat-room activity months after ISPs ordinarily would have deleted the logs--if they were ever kept in the first place.
Bottom line:
Data retention could aid criminal and terrorism prosecutions, but privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior could engender stiff opposition to the proposal.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison
If you don't want anyone to be able to find out who you are, just go to a free wireless area with a laptop.
If you don't want anyone to be able to find out who you are, just go to a free wireless area with a laptop
do you mean like the actual terrorists do?
There's still an ISP providing the connection to the hotspot. There's a log with your MAC (not Macintosh for those who don't know, it's a hardware address) address.
Not everyone lives in the big city.
Probably
Just because someone knows your MAC, doesn't mean they know who you are. Lots of people buy wi-fi cards with cash.
I guess, if you wanted to do bad stuff, without getting caught, you'd probably move, or at least travel a little.
So what you're saying is this wouldn't even help catch the people it's aimed at?
Plus tehre are certain wi-fi cards that can be spoofed ( give it a phony MAC address for a session so there is no trace back to the actual card ) with software available on the Internet.
If both ends were anonymous, I don't see how.
Easily done.
"So what you're saying is this wouldn't even help catch the people it's aimed at?"
Only if you believe it is aimed at terrorists. I, for one, don't.
I this goes thru ...and a Demo-rat wins in 2008....
I don't either.
this kind of record keeping has been going on for a number of years...
...beginning in the 'surprise, surprise' komrade krintoon administration!
But it's not required by law unless a law enforcement agency requests the info from the ISP. Even then, it's only 90 days. Now Comrade Bush's administration could be providing this power for the next Comrade Clinton administration.
Maybe some one needs to come up with a program which will constantly use your internet capacity at 100%. Send mail to dead addresses, visit websites at random, google for random topics, etc. That way the federales will not be able to separate that chaff from the grain of what you really do on the web. Imagine the ISP having to keep a 100MB log of web activity for each user each day.
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