Keeping America Safe From Nothing
From CNET:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/20/internet.records.bill/index.html
Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police
(CNET) — Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, supporter of a bill that would require Internet user records to be saved for police.
The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.
“While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,” U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday.
“Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level.”
Since when has it become the job of mommy and daddy government to watch out for our children? We have law makers who do not fully understand how anonymity on the internet works, and therefore want to pass horrible legislation such as this that does nothing but hurt every single internet user in the U.S.A. today. Of course, when you have people who say such wonderful things as the internet is a bunch of tubes, you end up with ignorant legislation that does nothing to help anyone.
It seems like their overall thought is good though, right? Protecting our kids from all those horrible child predators out there. They are so bad and we need to keep our kids safe. The real question is, how many child predators on the internet are there? We see this garbage on the news all the time, are inundated with it from programs like Law and Order: SVU and To Catch a Predator, it seems like they are just EVERYWHERE, but are they? Doubtful.
Let’s take at look at this bill for just a moment, though, and see what they plan on logging.
“all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”
Well, what records do they plan on maintaining then? The ip address is, like it says in the bill, only temporary. MAC address? Spoof it. Sure, the real MAC address is permanently imprinted on the network card, but using your OS to spoof works just fine.
So what does that leave? Tracking the user ids and passwords that you have on any website you log into? If the person is a savvy user, then they will go for complete and total anonymity and none of the information they use will be true to begin with. If you really want to remain totally anonymous, those “netbooks” are getting cheaper all the time, almost to the point where they could be like prepaid cell phones. Use them, then throw them away. As long as you paid cash for it, they could never track the sale back to you.
Of course, the real problem with this is that almost everyone uses DHCP to assign temporary ip addresses. This includes your home wireless router. So if some creep parks his van outside your house, accesses your wide open wi-fi because you didn’t know how to set up your security properly, you should be logging that persons information. How on earth is that even possible?
What this really comes down to, though, is personal responsibility. You, as a parent, should know what your children are doing on the internet, and should be tech savvy enough to know how to prevent them from getting around the blocks you should definitely put in place. Does that mean you may have to learn something new? Of course, but welcome to the XXIst century.
February 21st, 2009 at 23:18
If this passes, I look for public Wi Fi to go the way of the dodo bird. I know that if I was a cafe owner, I would rather do away with it than keep copious (and pointless) records.
I think I can be reasonably confident in saying this will not get anywhere. Cornyn just wants to be able to use those three magic words during his next campaign: “Tough on Crime”. I would bet tuition money that those three words never cost anyone a single vote in Texas.