"I am here from the Office of Pre-crime."
Posted on 04/14/2006 1:21:05 PM PDT by steve-b
The explosive idea of forcing Internet providers to record their customers' online activities for future police access is gaining ground in state capitols and in Washington, D.C....
Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months. And some proposals would require providers to retain data that ordinarily never would have been kept at all....
Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute, was the member of the Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee who asked Chertoff about data retention last month.
In an interview this week, Harper warned that mandatory data retention may cause more harm than good. "The true criminals will go and use random Wi-Fi nodes where you can get anonymous access," he said. "You haven't done anything but increase surveillance of law-abiding citizens."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
Oh, no they don't.
Nope.
Might as well get on with it. It is inevitable that the politicians will give the 1984 solution a try.
The Internet, however is not without it's resources to combat the loss of privacy. PGP will grow like a weed. Encryption in general will become pervasive. It may be hard (but maybe not impossible) to hide where you go but you will be able to hide the transactions. And then, of course, they will try to outlaw encryption. Then we will all be criminals.
Honestly, there's part of me that doesn't mind, the government has a warrant, it has the right to see anything. OTOH, with the precedent set that the government doesn't need a warrant for practically anything, my answer is HELL NO!
"I am here from the Office of Pre-crime."
Why build a system like Carnivore when you can just order the ISPs to do it for you?
Back to the good old days of Al Gore I guess -- clipper chip, key escrow, loads of fun. I know I refused to vote for Gore for a reason, but now I'm wondering why since things I feared under him are coming true anyway.
And check out the thread Phone Taps Just Got Impossible where some FReepers are apparently mad at the hindered snooping ability of the government.
The solution to this is simple.
Set up a Virtual Private Network server in the Bahamas, attach it to a huge internet pipe, and sell a subscription service for access to the VPN service. All your internet traffic will be sent via the pipe to the Bahamas, encrypted, and it will appear, for all intents and purposes, that the internet traffic is originating in the Bahamas.
For most private usage purposes, this set up will work fine. High bandwidth requirements might be a problem, but I'm sure that problem can be solved with faster servers, compression, and more bandwidth.
(Okay, so this solution isn't that simple. The simplest solution would be to piggy back off your neighbor's wireless when you're doing something naughty.)
Gotta be illegal -
Nail American citizens but allow ILLEGALS to do as they please.
Most ISP's keep such records at least for some period of time.
It is fairly hard to keep anything one does on the net a secret if someone wants to know what you are doing.
and you can make a case for being safer under the socialistDems????
Exactly. That's "enlightened communism" and it's been going on for as long as I can remember.
you are your ip address that big computer in the sky...
Like that would ever happen.
I can hardly tell the difference anymore...
any legal eagles...how come the 5th ammendment no longer seems to work here?
What you said.
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