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Bill Would Require ISPs, Wi-Fi Users To Keep Logs
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Feb 20, 2009 08:44 AM
from the boon-for-disk-makers dept.
from the boon-for-disk-makers dept.
suraj.sun notes CNet reporting on bills filed in the US House and Senate that would require all ISPs and operators of Wi-Fi hotspots — including home users — to maintain access logs for 2 years to aid in law enforcement. The bills were filed by Republicans, but the article notes that the idea of forcing data retention has been popular on both sides of the aisle over the years. "Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that... 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. ... Each [bill] contains the same language: 'A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user [i.e., DHCP].'"
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Good Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody here should write to both of their Senators and their Representative (regardless) and simply provide a link to this /. thread to educate them on all the technical reasons why this bill is very ill-conceived.
In layman's terms most of the reasons boil down to:
1. The required equipment will cost private citizens and small businesses a prohibitive amount of money. Many homes will find themselves spending more on their log archive than they spent on their computers, and small Internet cafe businesses simply be forced to close.
2. It will require expertise which most people simply don't have, forcing everybody to hire IT professionals to manage their home networks. (Ask your congerssperson if they know how to set up such a log without enlisting the help of an expert. Then ask them how a working-class family could ever afford to hire such help simply to use the Internet on their home laptops.)
3. It will utterly fail to achieve the objective of preventing anonymous Internet use. HDCP logs only record MAC addresses, which can easily be forged and sometimes are not even unique.
This bill is about as useful and practical as asking people to keep a filing cabinet full of photographs of every shoe-footprint that ever shows up in their back garden. It richly deserves to be laughed off the floors of Congress, should it ever even get that far.
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Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anybody point out that text files are easy to edit? Lines can be altered, removed or even added to them!
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Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anybody point out that text files are easy to edit? Lines can be altered, removed or even added to them!
Not only that, unless if they are continually pushed to a secure location you could alter them the second that you receive a notice from law enforcement to provide them with logs. They wouldn't know any better if it's authentic or not.
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Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Funny)
And somewhere in the background, you can hear the Trusted Computing machine starting up...
Thank god it's running windows - we've still got a while before it finishes booting!
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Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
No kidding. So the average home user now is required to set up a Syslog server on their computer and keep it running 24/7, or turn off their WAP when not using it.
But if you turn it off, they'll probably bitch about the missing sections in the logs, that have "obviously been deleted" to cover up illegal activities. Then they'll make an example of you.
To summarize the summary of the summary: People are a problem.
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Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
To correct your summary:
People who keep reelecting incumbents who legislate nanny-state laws are the problem.
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Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Funny)
If your backups "just happen" to get microwaved or otherwise destroyed, you'll quite likely be getting charged with destruction of evidence.
I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I couldn't hear you over the sound of my degausser warming up.
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Re:Good Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps we should have another party devoted to things like preserving an individuals Liberties.
Maybe we can call them Libertarians or something.
Too bad there isn't such a party for people to support.
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Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
Home users are really gonna do this. Oh and they will all patch their machines too.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Funny)
That's the very idea, they will never tell you do do it or how they expect your logs to be autenticated, so everyone will be on the wrong side of the law and the days some cops will be pissed that he didn't find any weapon, drug or libertarian literature while reading your house, that will be one more of the many reasons he could arrest you anyway.
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Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
Cops are not allowed to enter a home without a warrant or probable cause (they heard a scream inside). Anything they find will be expunged.
I have mod points, how do I mod this "naive?"
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Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
"Probable cause" is a lot more flexible than you might think.
>"...they heard a scream inside"
Better watch your TV with headphones then.
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Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Funny)
He means the Constitution.
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Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Interesting)
You jest, but the PA State website says one of the signs of domestic terrorists is a copy of the Constitution, or quotes of the Founders.
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Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of states' Domestic Terrorism websites say that -- it was part of a package deal or something given out by the DHS, story broke about a year or two ago.
You know, we act facetious on here when we joke about "freedom and liberty is dead" and all that, but the fact remains that we're living in a very scary place when "quoting the Constitution" is considered grounds for suspicion of being a terrorist...
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Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stimulus Storage? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people don't know how to turn on WEP or WPA encryption on their wireless routers let along find how to turn on logging and setting a backup routine to keep years of data. Heck most people/governments/companies cant keep years of data on their own PC.
I wonder how many of these lawmakers are in compliance of this purposed law.
Re:Yea... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Yea... (Score:5, Funny)
There are 3 sorts of responses to this post.
the first type, which I expect to see shortly, is from the "tinfoil hat" contingent; the type that will tell you to take off your tinfoil hat when you post anything about the Echelon system, for example.
The 2nd type is from the "jaded acknowledger's" contingent; usually it takes the form of "No Shit. But what you gonna do?".
The 3rd type is from the "meta" group. Hi.
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Re:Yea... (Score:5, Funny)
Hi.
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Re:Yea... (Score:5, Insightful)
The first rule of a police state is that EVERYONE is breaking the law.
As tedious as it is, Atlas Shrugged has something to teach us. Don't bother to read the book though, all you need to know is in the following quote [wordpress.com]:
Sometimes I feel like a bot whose only real purpose is to paste this quote. But as it is a leading force in American society that people seem to have mostly forgotten, I believe it bears some heavy repetition.
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Re:Yea... (Score:5, Interesting)
that's what happened to the MIT girl at Logan airport. Instead of admitting they had f-ed up, they charged her with bringing a hoax bomb into the airport. A lot of home routers don't have the capacity to hold 2 years worth of data and don't have the capabillity to offload old log files to another machine, unless you violate the DMCA to hack into the file system.
That brings up another aspect: is this really an anti-terrorism/hacking law or is it really just an RIAA/MPAA tool to give them the info they need to sue the pants off of people?
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This is almost an ipv6 mandate. (Score:5, Interesting)
The unintended consequence of this is that every user on a system is going to get a fixed ipv6 ip and ipv4 traffic would be gradually phased out. Why bother with the administrative burden of issuing an IP address via dhcp and tracking it, when, you could have an ipv6 theoretically assigned to a customer for the life of a device.
naturally... (Score:5, Insightful)
they just *had* to get the children involved in this somehow.. the full title of the legislation is:
Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act
Re:naturally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea having the parents in jailed/heavily fined because they didn't keep backup logs will really help the children grow up to be useful and productive systems. Because we all know if your parents are in jail and/or living in poverty helps kids grow up to be good citizens.
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Re:naturally... (Score:5, Interesting)
Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act
Internet SAFETY Act...
Well, you can't really blame them. They have a pathological need to make their bills acronym friendly.
No doubt some dickwad came up with the "Internet SAFETY Act" and gave it to some peon to work out what SAFETY should stand for.
Parent
Infinite storage (Score:5, Funny)
I discovered that if I log my wifi router to /dev/null, it works really fast and never seems to fill up, how excellent!
Here's my log (Score:5, Funny)
Rorschach's log, Feb 20th, 1985
8:50 AM:
Internet connection activated by the scum of this city. Repugnant person scouring 4chan. May be a furry. Must investigate.
9:27 AM:
Wifi user connected to Google Docs. Probably writing communist pamphlet. His web document is shouting to Google's server "save me." I pull internet connection and icmp back "no".
9:45 AM:
Somebody killed one of my servers tonight. Server logs say "slashdot". Might be planning something big.
etc...
If the average AOL "me too" type user (Score:5, Insightful)
is too clueless to secure his wireless router, how the heck is he/she/it going to know how to maintain a 2 year log file of every access?
Just how much use is..... (Score:5, Insightful)
10.10.10.10 Assigned to 01:23:45:67:89:01 20090220135000
Going to be when the 1st bit is a setting made by me and the MAC address is easily Spoofable.
What next - everyone must register the MAC addresses of all their network kit and sanctions if you change it ?
More idiocy from people that dont understand how stuff works.
Not a partisan issue (Score:5, Insightful)
The Republicans want this "in the interest of national security" so they can stop the terr-rists.
The Democrats want this so they can save the children from all of that evil kiddie porn, and also so the **AA can better control the media you consume, kill P2P and net neutrality, and bill you for it appropriately.
They both want stuff like this so they can control the citizens better.
Where's the party who doesn't want any of this shit and thinks the government has much, much more important stuff on its plate right now?
Re:Not a partisan issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Legitimate question: why is the Libertarian party so marginalized in America? Their platform basically represents everything that most Americans will claim to believe in, so why do they have so little support? Is it them? Are they just bad at marketing themselves to the American Public? Are they so idealistic as to be completely impractical? Is it that Americans are actually pretty hypocritical? They say they love freedom and liberty, but then when they realize how much responsibility it takes they say to the government "ew, you take care of everything".
If it's the case that the Libertarian Party is essentially too uncompromising on ideals in order to function in the real world, isn't there a middle ground somewhere? Some party that says "yes, we really do love liberty, and we recognize that it requires responsibility, but here are some concessions that we recognize must be made for the real world". Who is that party? Is that kind of thinking what gets us Democrats and Republicans?
I've just never understood why "Libertarian" has become such a joke of a thing to be, when it essentially encompasses everything that Americans are "supposed" to cherish.
Parent
precisely because most Americans don't agree (Score:5, Insightful)
The Libertarian party supports some principles that, broadly speaking, Americans believe in. More or less, these are classical liberal principles, in the mold of Thomas Jefferson. However, few people support their particular hardline interpretation, which tends to emphasize the anarcho-capitalist aspects, play down Jeffersonian elements that don't fit into that (e.g. Jefferson's view that governments should restrict the power of large corporations), and make few exceptions for any reason. Abolishing free public education, for example, is not a popular position. Neither is privatizing the road system. Some for of social safety nets are also popular---people don't want them abused (e.g. the stereotypical "welfare queens"), but neither do they want them to be totally absent. People also want regulation of private enterprise when its activities can cause negative externalities, such as systemic risks to economies (like banks, where further deregulation, the Libertarian position, is currently extremely unpopular). I could go on for a while.
Now if someone started a political party with positions more similar to those of the editorial line of The Economist newsmagazine, I could see voting for them. That is, support free-market economies with regulation and/or costing of negative externalities (pollution, systemic risks, etc.), a moderate social safety net, and liberal positions on social and civil liberties issues.
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Tit for Tat (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because jail is fun.
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody who values liberty should be willing to spend some time in jail, rather than submit to an unconstitutional tyrannical law.
I say "unconstitutional" because it is illegal for congress to order me, in my private home, to keep logs. Their authority ends at the interstate border. In regards to my private Wifi service, the only authority I have to obey is my home state legislature, since I operate completely and wholly within the state.
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
The Homeland Security agent can demand until he turns black in the face, but demanding isn't getting. Simple answer: No. Tough shit.
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, the buggies the Amish use don't have headlights. The govt makes them put reflectors on their buggies, that the Amish hate.
I can assure you, if this goes into effect (And just to be clear, I hate this idea), you won't get away with "My equipment is not capable of meeting your requirements"
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
Without liberty, you may not have a life or a future, dude.
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
Good question. I'm fairly certain the original intent of the Constitution was Not to invade private homes. They had interstate commerce in the 1780s (letters, pamphlets) but never intended that Congress should require Thom or George or Ben or James to keep a log of every letter they ever mailed.
"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry
ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect
the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning
may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the
probable one in which it was passed." - Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democrats
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
Only as long as you let them legislate whatever they want. That's the basis of the whole system. Do you hate what the government is doing? Really? Do you hate it enough to do something about it? Or are you just gonna sit at your computer and complain about it on /.?
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Insightful)
Only as long as you let them legislate whatever they want. That's the basis of the whole system. Do you hate what the government is doing? Really? Do you hate it enough to do something about it? Or are you just gonna sit at your computer and complain about it on /.?
I'd do something about it sooner, but there's a waiting period on purchasing firearms! A well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny!
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Re:Generate your own 'fake' logs (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree. It has been well-known since the start that liberty is not free. Thomas Jefferson said the people must, from time to time, revolt and shed blood. (Or spend time in jail.) People must be willing to stand-up for their freedom, not just buckle under, and if that means spending a little time in jail because you refuse to comply with an unconstitutional law, so be it.
And to answer your other question, I don't keep logs and never will.
Fuck them.
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