Free Market Coalition Opposes Digital Dragnet

Digital Liberty ^ | 2011-07-27 | [Staff]

[92nina]

...The coalition letter explains that:

“The mandate would impact an extraordinarily broad array of businesses of all sizes that offer Internet service to the public for a fee. Americans access the Internet not only at home but also at coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, offices, and at numerous other venues. Requiring all firms that sell Internet access to log temporary network address data would impose substantial costs. As with all burdensome regulations on the private sector, consumers themselves ultimately bear most of the costs incurred by companies in complying with the data retention mandate.”

“H.R. 1981 follows in the footsteps of repressive governments such as China, which recently enacted a similar retention mandate covering wireless Internet providers to facilitate its suppression of dissidents. America should take the moral high ground: citizens are innocent until proven guilty. A blanket mandate requiring providers to retain network address information pertaining to all citizens—the vast majority of whom have never been charged with a criminal offense—amounts to a ‘digital dragnet’ of staggering proportions.”

“An extensive body of empirical evidence, including the experiences of other nations in which similar laws have been enacted, strongly suggests that H.R. 1981 is not likely to result in any appreciable decrease in crimes committed against children. Congress is rightly concerned about the horrific crime of child exploitation, but the proper response to such concerns is a narrowly tailored approach that preserves Internet freedom and minimizes burdens on the private sector while enabling law enforcement to bring child predators to justice.”

[92nina]

"This morning, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary will mark up H.R. 1981, a bill that would impose a broad data retention mandate on all U.S. commercial Internet service providers..."

Take this article and others I found to the fight to the Libs on their own turf; put the Left on the defensive at at Digg and at Reddit and in Stumbleupon and Delicious

[ken21]

bump for later read.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

There is an intense desire by government control freaks and voyeurs around the world to basically *stop* the Internet, or any part of it that is not under vast amounts of control and surveillance.

They are deeply frightened by anything they don’t think they control, or cannot surreptitiously watch. And to make matters worse, they *all* want to control everything. So it is not just *a* government agency, or a dozen of them, but hundreds of such police and intelligence organizations, including those of other nations, corporations, and who knows who else that want their hand in.

If you want to call your mother on the phone, how many phone taps could there be before you can’t even hear each other?

The same with the Internet. So many people desperate to see your search for “Amy Winehouse” on Google, by using your clock ticks and watching your packets, that your computer slows down to a crawl.

To make matters worse, instead of paying for such control and surveillance themselves, they want you to pay for the privilege. That is why this law makes it mandatory for thousands or tens of thousands of businesses to buy the expensive equipment to do it *for* them. Knowing full well that the only recourse is to pass the cost of the espionage on to their customers.

So how much are you willing to pay to be spied on? A few hundred dollars a year? A few thousand? Small price to pay to sexually gratify control freaks and voyeurs, hired by the people you thought were representing you.