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Congress Tries To Hide Data Retention Law Pretending It's an Anti-Child Porn Law

95 points| ygreek | 14 years ago |techdirt.com | reply

9 comments

order
[+] grandpa|14 years ago|reply
Here in Canada, we have bills with neutral names like C15. It sounds like in America, the title is used to frame the conversation, as in the notorious "Repeal the job killing healthcare law act".
[+] dp1234|14 years ago|reply
In America you can pretty much guarantee that if the bill has a name that makes it sound like it is good for you...it will definitely be bad for you.
[+] CWuestefeld|14 years ago|reply
Here in the USA, too. Bills have designation, HR1981 in this case. But that doesn't stop politicians and the press for looking for cute turns of phrase or sound bites.
[+] elehack|14 years ago|reply
One thing I'm unclear on is what the definition of "provider of an electronic communication service" is. From the bill text (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-1981) and Title 18 definitions section (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/search/display.html?terms=...), it seems to be ISP, since they're requiring the "temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account" to be retained. This leads me to believe that the bill basically requires ISPs to keep IP <=> account mappings around, and isn't so egregious as to require e.g. Google to store de-anonymized logs for all account usage for 18 months; the definitions seem to corroborate this.

In which case it's questionable, but not near as bad as it could be. Or am I missing something?

[+] owenmarshall|14 years ago|reply
The bill further limits administrative subpoenas to the US Marshal service that are investigating child pornography cases.

I think the argument people have is that the US Marshal service could abuse this mechanism to blindly issue reams of subpoenas and see what sticks.

The law should protect against that by requiring good cause to obtain the subpoena. Whether or not it does is the sticking point.

[+] onedognight|14 years ago|reply
Coffee shops and bookstores also provide "temporarily assigned network addresses". Might they be covered by this as well?