Posted on 01/25/2011 12:11:43 PM PST by FromLori
Criminal investigations "are being frustrated" because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing, the U.S. Department of Justice will announce tomorrow.
CNET obtained a copy of the department's position on mandatory data retention--saying Congress should strike a "more appropriate balance" between privacy and police concerns--that will be announced at a House of Representatives hearing tomorrow.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...
Will this new law apply to the Obots who keep scrubbing the Internet of articles unfavorable to their Obamamessiah?
Criminal investigations "are being frustrated" because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing......and no mention is to be made at the leftist howls when library book lending patterns were going to be studied.
At some point, a future tyrant WILL misuse this information by crunching our internet history with brilliant data mining techniques that already have existed for over a decade.
The next Stalin wannabee will be able to assign an enemies list quotient to all of us serfs. If he is feeling froggy enough or if he has the power, he could order the National Police (we have one) to arrest everybody with a quotient over a certain point on the scale.
Hitler, Stalin and Mao NEVER had a handy tool like that!
Uh, I didn’t say anything about when they were going to misuse the data. I said such legislation is unlike to pass the GOP-led House.
No, I gotcha. I’m not disagreeing, I agree. I just point out that the worse problem is the inevitable future misuse of data.
Har! Very good.
SD! I’ve missed you!
You are seeing the IP address your ISP hands out...they have that main one to use as your gateway. You’re using a firewall router no doubt, so that website sees just the one IP address of the ISP.
It changes occasionally, as the ISP dictates....not so very often, tho.
Unfunded mandate?
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If you are using FireFox, there is an Add-On at External IP 0.9.9.6 that plugs it into the status line at the bottom. It shows the address assigned from your ISP, regardless of any routers or hubs you have in your local network. If your IP changes, it will alert you.
You can also get this widget and stick it on your FR page:
Enjoy!
Thanks, I’ll make of those two.
Of course, when just about anybody first sees that Danasoft widgit, they’ll think someone has installed some sort of spy program and has captured their IP.
Nothing new. In the 90s CALEA required the telcos to develop and implement digital phone tapping technology for law enforcement, and pay for it themselves.
This depends on the logs. At a minimum they keep who was assigned what IP address when. I don't mind retention of this for quite a while. For law enforcement purposes it's the same as asking the phone company who owned that unlisted phone number that called in a bomb threat.
Retaining what IP addresses customers hit starts craking the storage capacity necessary. This is kind of like a phone company keeping pen traces, which doesn't even require a warrant for the police to get. Any one customer is likely to hit over a thousand IPs a day (all those ads get served by different IPs, each photo you see on FR comes from a different IP). Multiply that by a million users, you have to store over a billion records of time plus user plus IP address. Many gigabytes per day.
It gets worse when they want to retain URL strings, http headers and cookies so they can get an idea of what a person was doing. He may have touched the IP of a kiddie porn site, but which document or photo if any did he download? This would generate huge amounts of data, probably hundreds of gigabytes per day for that million-customer ISP, requiring a massive investment in storage. And that's just for web browsing. It would also be highly intrusive.
The only thing beyond that your web browser does is cache the whole pages and images you've browsed.
For most residential customers, that address is unique to you for a period of time, until it is issued to someone else. Normally, using a cable customer as an example, you keep your IP at least until you unplug your cable modem. You may be issued a different one when you plug it back in.
Thanks for that reply. This is definitely an area where people need to be more knowledgeable. Here is an interesting article concerning Google data retention policies:
I’m going to observe my IP for a time and see how often it changes. I don’t think it changes very often, but it is interesting that my telecom ISP seems to relocate its base periodically because the city that will show up in all these internet ads and any site that tries to show a user’s city, well that changes periodically for me. And those are always where I think the IP has particular equipment because the city displayed is never actually the smaller town where I live.
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