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To be clear, the full text of that portion of the legislation says:

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(a) In General- Section 2703 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`(h) Retention of Certain Records- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).'.

(b) Sense of Congress- It is the sense of Congress that records retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18, United States Code, should be stored securely to protect customer privacy and prevent against breaches of the records.

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In other words, it amends the existing language [0] which says (in part):

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A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall disclose to a governmental entity the—

(A) name;

(B) address;

(C) local and long distance telephone connection records, or records of session times and durations;

(D) length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized;

(E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and

(F) means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number),

of a subscriber to or customer of such service when the governmental entity uses an administrative subpoena authorized by a Federal or State statute or a Federal or State grand jury or trial subpoena or any means available under paragraph (1).

[snip]

(f) Requirement To Preserve Evidence.—

(1) In general.— A provider of wire or electronic communication services or a remote computing service, upon the request of a governmental entity, shall take all necessary steps to preserve records and other evidence in its possession pending the issuance of a court order or other process.

(2) Period of retention.— Records referred to in paragraph (1) shall be retained for a period of 90 days, which shall be extended for an additional 90-day period upon a renewed request by the governmental entity.

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So you're 100% right: the name, address, etc information is ALREADY being preserved. This legislation mandates that records of IP addresses linked to accounts be stored for at least 18 months, whereas before they would have been retained for 90-180 days.

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[0]: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002703----...

Definitely not a deliberate lie. The bill amends previous bills on the topic by adding the retention of IP-adresses etc.

If I was unclear in the post I am very sorry and will amend the post.

That said the core of the post stand. The linking of currently stored data with IP-addresses creates a direct link from internet usage to personal data. Something that should scare most people.

But the part everybody's getting worked up over is the tracking of Internet activity, which is not part of current law, and is not part of the bill in question. I have no idea where that part came from, so I'd be glad if you could make that clear.

I am actually thinking that you are in fact correct here. Though most articles on the bills in question describe them as 'Tracking internet usage' (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/house-committee-approv... , http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/07/29/congress-child-p... etc) what the bill in question (and previous bills on the subject) states is the mandatory storage of assigned IP-addresses.

Now I guess one could assume that our ISP's save our browser history, however there is no mandate in this bill for access to that data.

I will look over the blog post and make edits to clarify this.

Thank you very much for pointing this out!

I have updated the post to reflect the fact that the amendment or previous bill does not explicitly refer to tracking of internet habits. I will continue to investigate the bills and available data etc.

I would like to thank you for pointing this out and I took the liberty of thanking you in my update of the post.

I think it's great that you're actively open to feedback and fixing it, but basically it means that you started out writing about stuff you, apparently, knew nothing about, so just assumed things.

That sounds a lot like FUD tactics. The internet freedom camp seems to apply these more and more, seriously blurring the debate and screwing it over. Why are you doing these things? Why do you act as bad as the people crafting these laws? Why do you allow both camps in this debate to remove all truth altogether?

IP addresses were already preserved:

> (E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002703----...

The new law explicitly amends the previous law so that IP address records are stored for 18 months, as opposed to 90 days.

Why does everyone keep saying that this allows the data (which is already retained) to be accessed without a warrant? The bill doesn't address warrants at all, and the amended code requires them.

The bill addresses Subpoenas, which, in this case, refers to the legal requirement of ISPs to provide evidence for an investigation. Following the amendments back to their source is also insightful. If you read carefully you can see how they use technicalities in related legal code to get what they want. The shocking takeaway is that they do not have to notify you “the subscriber” of any kind of investigation. They write about the need to ensure consumer privacy by putting the information in a safe place under the careful watch of “a government or state organization.” So this could be interpreted as a way of taking your private data and doing whatever they want with it since it will belong to an organization not under the same rules the govt has to play.