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

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

techdirt.com

95 pointsygreek9 comments

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".

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.

Canadian bills get named, like in the recent case of C-51, also known as "Lawful Access". If that isn't an attempt to frame the conversation, I don't know what is. More about Lawful Access here:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5885/125/ http://openmedia.ca/StopSpying

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.

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?

Coffee shops and bookstores also provide "temporarily assigned network addresses". Might they be covered by this as well?

> Of course, as Chris Soghoian points out, the bill exempts WiFi providers, so it's woefully ineffective at stopping child porn, since anyone who wanted to do that just needs to go to Starbucks.

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.

The system works pretty well in normal criminal cases. If the defense can show the subpoena was issued illegally the government can't use any evidence gathered as a result. It's a pretty big embarrassment for the cops and the DA, and doubly so if the suspect walks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com