From Declan McCullagh at CNet:
Your ISP as Net watchdog | CNET News.com:"The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers' online activities.
Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs--that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept.
In theory, at least, data retention could permit successful criminal and terrorism prosecutions that otherwise would have failed because of insufficient evidence. But privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior have caused a similar proposal to stall in Europe and could engender stiff opposition domestically...."
1 comment:
Frankly, I couldn't agree with this more. I am the victim of an ongoing major criminal harassment scheme, and part of my difficulty in procuring evidence to help expose the scheme and bring the individuals to justice is the fact they were on my system by rootkit and would delete damning data before I could transfer it to hard copy. My efforts to get ISP assistance for the abuse were wasted. It is alarming how ineffective it is to even report abuse to a person's ISP, or request assistance from your own ISP. I think all ISPs should be legally obligated to keep any and all logs for an extended duration, given the escalating incidences of internet crime (and in particular, cyber harassment/stalking, and identity theft). As an aside, I happened upon your blog by researching criminal and civil case law for harassment and invasion of privacy, and would like to thank you for maintaining such an informative resource. DD Toronto, ON
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