Look, my skin crawls at the mention of Lamar Smith after SOPA, but this article is a serious misreading of the quoted language in H.R. 1981, and the FUD in the comment thread makes it even worse. This kind of reaction serves only to give ammunition to SOPA-backing politicians and corporate interests by *rightly* painting us all with the same broad brushes of "overreacting" and "misinformation."
There are other, unrelated provisions in the bill, but the proposed amendment to 18 U.S.C. § 2703 is MUCH narrower than the article claims. Here is what the plain language of the bill states:
- ISPs would be required to maintain logs of the dynamic IP addresses they assign to subscribers for a period of at least 12 months, in case the government needs that data for criminal investigations.That's it. No more. It's a preservation-of-evidence rule. Most ISPs do this anyway, although the exact time period might be shorter or longer. To the extent Comcast or AT&T or whoever is maintaining insecure systems, they can already be hacked and this information can already be obtained.This kind of data retention is a Good Thing. Without historical dynamic IP address data, gathering evidence to solve and prosecute many crimes would be difficult, because how do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt who was using computer A from IP address B at time C to access website D and commit crime E?I'm talking "real" crimes here, kids, not file sharing or whatever. Like when a guy lures a 13-year-old girl into a long-distance relationship on MySpace, wins her trust and then kidnaps/rapes/murders her. IP address logs, like cell phone records, can be critical evidence in that kind of case to solve and prosecute crimes, or better, stop them in progress. (This kind of data has also been used to clear wrongly accused people by showing they were logged in to Facebook from location X while a crime was taking place at location Y in another city, etc.)The proposed amendment to 18 U.S.C. § 2703 DOESN'T say that ISPs can just be required to hand this data over to the government or anybody else. For that, the government needs to comply with ECPA, the federal privacy law that's been around since the 1980s, by getting the right kind of court order or search warrant. It also doesn't say anything about tracking the sites you visit, etc.So in this case, we have a legislator simply overselling the virtues of a law that will probably change little (if anything) from the status quo, yet allows him to brag about "Doing Something" to combat trafficking in child pornography or any other unsavory content
