Posted on 07/31/2011 4:38:42 PM PDT by lbryce
On Thursday, the US House of Representatives approved an internet snooping bill that requires internet service providers (ISPs) to keep records of customer activity for a year so police can review them as needed. Here's what this bill means for you and what you can do about it.
What Is This Internet Snooping Bill, Exactly, and Why Is It Bad?
The lovingly titled Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCFIPA of 2011) requires ISPs to retain customer names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and dynamic IP addresses. It's a record of your personal information plus the web sites you visit. It's like handing over a year's worth of browser history plus the contents of your wallet to the police. The thing is, you're not really handing it over so much as your ISP is—without your consent.
You might be wondering what this has to do with child pornography and protecting children, as the bill claims to exist for those reasons. The idea is that child pornographers will be easier to catch if these records are available, and that, in turn, will protect children. According to the Denver Post, child pornography cases have been on the rise and there have been over 10,000 arrests since 1996. While the police should be prosecuting child pornographers and consumers, the problem isn't so out of control that these extreme measures are necessary.
(Excerpt) Read more at lifehacker.com ...
A lot of people still don’t get it.
Yea I just assume the government will hear or see anything I do if it really wants to. We live behind digital bars my FRiend. No way around it best I can tell.
Well,,, I just want to say again, that I have no guns! Boating accident, don’t ya know!
The author of this article apparently doesn't understand the difference between a bill being voted out of a House Committee and a bill that "the US House of Representatives approved"...
Maybe somebody will be nice enough to buy the author a clue...
Child pornography is the ruse used to obtain this law.
Who can argue against a law that seeks to stop child pornography?
This law will be used for a lot of other things besides child pornography, The IRS and States taxing purchases over the internet come to mind.
The author fails to mention that Tor already has a button implemented for FireFox. Besides, for anyone who values their privacy, using a Google product is antithetical.
I once worked with a guy who along with his family lived in Czechoslovakia during WWII. His father was very outspoken against Hitler. One day the gestapo arrested his father and he was neither seen nor heard from again. A neighbor had reported his father to the local gestapo.
Now we have a collectivist government here.
Just visit your friendly public library and use one of their PCs. From what I have read, I am not aware of any one of them that is blocking access to porn websites. I am aware of complaints by library users about men using the library PCs for porn use, and the library saying it can due nothing about it.
Too bad Tor is so slow. One way to secure data is to use TrueCrypt, though unfortunately that doesn’t do anything for data sent over the internet.
As an aside, how would your ISP get your financial information when any decent billing system uses SSL?
Bookmark
Could sure find dirt on a lot of people, that’s for sure. Imagine a politician’s records get subpoenad, they could point out anything that he checked out adult sites or that he was seeing a marriage counselor.
Onion routers will become more popular now.
The government lost the battle over encryption about 10 years ago. You know that is not going to sit for long. Since encryption also protects perverts it is already coming up again.
The original bill only mandated tracking the temporary IP of each customer:
(a) In General- Section 2703 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`(h) Retention of Certain Records- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).’.
(b) Sense of Congress- It is the sense of Congress that records retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18, United States Code, should be stored securely to protect customer privacy and prevent against breaches of the records.
You too? Man been going around lately.
How's that workin’ out for you?
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