The Liberty Papers

Republican lawmakers are renewing their efforts to turn Internet Service Providers into deputies of law enforcement:

All Internet service providers would need to track their customers’ online activities to aid police in future investigations under legislation introduced Tuesday as part of a Republican “law and order agenda.” With the amount of usage on the internet these days (click here for the stats), it can hold a lot of vital and necessary information for police or other authorities. Employees of any Internet provider who fail to store that information face fines and prison terms of up to one year, the bill says. The U.S. Justice Department could order the companies to store those records forever. Hopefully, all companies will get this news before the bill is enforced. A lot of companies make use of proxies (click here) to keep their employee searches anonymous. This helps them to maintain cybersecurity, so many businesses use those. However, this bill would prevent companies from using those.

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, called it a necessary anti-cybercrime measure. “The legislation introduced today will give law enforcement the tools it needs to find and prosecute criminals,” he said in a statement.

The proposed law doesn’t define what information ISPs would be required to keep, but leaves that up to the Attorney General and the Justice Department:

Details about data retention requirements would be left to [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales. At a minimum, the bill says, the regulations must require storing records “such as the name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol address, user identification or telephone number was assigned, in order to permit compliance with court orders.”

Because there is no limit on how broad the rules can be, Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, or e-mail conversations indefinitely. (The bill does not, however, explicitly cover search engines or Web hosting companies, which officials have talked about before as targets of regulation.)

That broad wording also would permit the records to be obtained by private litigants in noncriminal cases, such as divorces and employment disputes. That raises additional privacy concerns, civil libertarians say.

As the industry argues, there is simply no evidence that providers have not cooperated with law enforcement in the past upon being served by a duly issued subpoena or search warrant. Instead, what it does is create a vast amount of data that can be used by the government for whatever purpose it deems necessary without regard to whether there is probable cause that a crime has been committed, and without any concern at all for the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of Internet users.