Police: Internet providers must keep user logs | Hacker News Reader

Police: Internet providers must keep user logs

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20 pointsnextparadigms13 comments

""The limited data retention time and lack of uniformity among retention from company to company significantly hinders law enforcement's ability to identify predators when they come across child pornography," according to a copy of Brown's remarks. Any stored logs could, however, be used to prosecute any type of crime."

I would laugh, if it wasn't so sad. It really does seem that they were right in the Torrentfreak article the other day, and now they are all using the "child pornography" excuse to introduce any type of law like this.

That excuse is starting to become really insulting, because they're assuming we're all too dumb to recognize they have a different agenda behind this.

Well, they're going to treat us like idiots until they understand that (the amorphous) "we" is not. That said:

https://twitter.com/#!/emptywheel/status/90798809378062337

It's not about kiddie porn, that's just the excuse.

This is _not_ a defense of the proposed legislation, only my experience with local law enforcement in Kansas.

TL;DR There are many professional and thoughtful police officers and deputies that take every precaution to protect citizens' privacy. Because of their hard work and professionalism, logs of the last 24 hours were more than enough to help their investigation.

While working for a sizable WISP in 2010, we were approached by a local police office asking if we could help them pin point the location of a murder suspect on the run from Wisconsin.

The suspect had used our wireless mesh network to access his MySpace account, which was being monitored. Because our logins reset every 24 hours and because of the NAT'd nature of our wireless network, we were able to give the police approximately 10 locations where the suspect might have been within a 200' radius. The police followed up on those locations and were able to find where suspect had been staying.

Unfortunately, they missed him by a few hours and he was eventually caught in Colorado a few days later. It was an eye opening experience. The officers reiterated again and again that they wanted as little extraneous information as possible and did not want to involve anyone that had no connection.

This legislation would certainly aid responsible and trust-worthy law enforcement officers in catching criminals. Bush's (and now Obama's) policy of warrantless wiretapping may have also been effective against terrorism. Perhaps torturing indefinitely-held detainees in secret overseas prisons shed even some light on terrorist operations. That said, I vehemently oppose both of these policies, despite any good that may have come from them. The former is obviously by definition abuse, and the latter has a staggering potential for abuse. As citizens, we should be wary of any legislation where the potential for abuse is high, or where the consequences of any abuse could be severe.

I completely agree with this type of use.

The issue is laws are generally written to allow unlimited access for any reason to any amount of data at any time. This allows abuse. While the law will allow your use for the greater good, it will probably also allow a police officer to request the logs of his daughter's current boyfriend.

I haven't read the law, so my comment may be completely inaccurate, but I don't really have much faith in the law being written properly and providing real incentive to not abuse the power.

Do all laws have such disgusting names? Why do they call it the "Protect Our Children Act" instead of the "Mandatory IP Address Assignment Data Retention Act"? Are we all really that stupid?

If this is such an important problem for society, why not just install cameras in all homes just to make sure nobody is producing or watching child porn?

> Are we all really that stupid?

If "we" means the median voter, sadly the answer is probably yes.

It's all in a name, isn't it? There are strict rules around how you're allowed to describe legislation as it appears in the voter guide, and this can be very contentious. Prop 8 in California was ultimately defined as "Eliminates Rights of Same-Sex Couples to Marry", but proponents of Prop 8 fought pretty hard to have it listed as "Defines Marriage as a union of a man and a woman" (or something like that). It makes a difference.

How it is presented in the media is, of course, completely up for grabs. I think prop 8 was promoted as "Defense of Marriage Act", and some media outlets went with it, others didn't.

I find examples that irritate me on the right and the left. I'm socially liberal, but I prefer to say that I support legal access to abortion, rather than describing myself as "pro-choice".

Of course, in the bare-knuckles world of politics, many people would say "thanks for the civics lesson, now please put some grease on my facial cut, check my glove strings, and get my water bottle, cause the bell is about to ring for round 10".

>Are we all really that stupid?

Yes, yes we are.

I think I may start habitually ssh tunneling my traffic through a VPS. My desire for privacy is not and should not be inherently incriminating.

In France, we set up that a long time ago. Presumably, the amazing effect it had on child pornography convinced US representative to try the same…

Sarcasm aside, I'm saddened to see my country set the example for something opposite of the universal human rights declaration.

We need an internet without ISPs. These attacks on our privacy are getting ridiculous.

I need to get Tor set up now..

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