Congress wants your browsing history
May 18th, 2006 by Atomictumor
I haven’t talked much about the whole NSA wiretapping fiasco, because I think anybody who’ll say that theres justification in the .gov randomly listening in on conversations of private citizens is either a moron or a facist. Liberty doesn’t have exceptions.
However, CNET today writes that legislation backed by A.G. Gonzalez is being introduced to Congress that will require ISPs to keep logs of internet usage by subscribers for “a reasonable period of time”.  The legislation is being introduced by Wisconsin’s Rep F. James Sensenbrenner, submitter of such past hits as the Patriot Act, the Real ID act, and who is supposed to lead the fight against those damn copyright infringers and fair use activsts with the upcoming Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006. On top of being a whopping Bush admin tool, he’s also the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, threw a hissy during renewal talks for the Patriot Act after those darn democrats mentioned Guantanamo Bay too many times, and is the top ranking House member in terms of privately paid travel costs from 2001-2005.
But enough on F. Jim, lets talk about the act. Under it, all browsing history, chat logs, downloads, uploads, games played, and transactions made will be logged by ISPs at their expense. Executives who don’t comply with the act can be fined, and thrown in jail for up to one year. Unfortunately, as AT&T, Verizon, and Bellsouth don’t seem to mind hooking up the NSA (OK, Bellsouth disputes it, but they suck, so I’m ignoring it), you can bet they’ll line right up to hook up the DoJ.
Want more? Heres some more. Theres also a provision under the law that blogs, search engines, email providers, and whoever else that has “reason to believe” it facilitates access to child pornography–through hyperlinks or a discussion forum, for instance, is up against a federal felony. Now, theres nothing worse than child predators, but poorly written laws are almost as bad. Under the word of this law, whats keeping me from making an anonymous account and putting a comment on Slashdot with some kiddie porn URL long enough for Google to cache it, and the man to put the federal felony hammer down. I think it would certainly suck, and I don’t like it.
Of course, keep in mind that the man behind this internet legislation recently said:
“At the most basic level, the Internet is used as a tool for sending and receiving large amounts of child pornography on a relatively anonymous basis,”