The US seems to be competing with the
UK in ever more bizarre measures to spy on its citizens.
US senator Lamar Smith, obviously from
Texas, has put a law before the Senate that will require ISPs to hang onto their
data for two years. Smith claims that his new law will
protect children, but similar laws have all been killed off in the committee
stage because they have been too broad in scope and packed full of
unconstitutional language.
A press release on Cornyn's site said
the law is more specific. It demands that ISPs must "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.
Basically they will have to keep a
record of which subscriber account was assigned a dynamic IP address at a
particular time. However detractors point out that the
current system is working fine. ISPs which discard records after a few months
often keep tabs on known criminals for much longer at a coppers' request.
However the belief is that armed with
two years worth of Internet records it would be possible for authorities to find
out who are P2P pirates, or who consistantly visits illegal sites over a long
period of time.