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"All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims,"

That's because, Mr. Director of Funded But Incompetent, storing log files takes disk space and disk space costs money.

I've worked for several ISPs, from mom-and-pop shops to one of the largest in the country. It is common practice to discard all logs of routers unless you are troubleshooting.

Since the 1996 Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act (thanks Bill!) most ISP's send all of their server logs directly to /dev/null, thus bypassing the law requiring them to retain logs for 90 days of any record in their possession. By not generating logs, they have nothing to retain.

If ISPs store every log file of every user packet, who is going to pay for all of that storage?

People are entitled to have an INFORMED opinion. Too bad blowhards like this can stand in front of a microphone and display their ignorance.

As a practical matter, a US Government mandate to log user activity would probably sink every ISP with less than 5000 users immediately.

For the rest, expect your ISP bill to double instantly.