Is there yet another leak in the personal privacy boat?
This time it’s the work of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, (D-Fla.) and 25 other co-sponsors, who approved a bill (H.R. 1981) that would require Internet service providers to keep for a minimum of 18 months every IP address they assign to their users when they surf the Web.
Today, some providers keep such records for less than a week.
The reason for the propsed change? So the addresses can aid police in catching child pornographers.
Never mind there is no clear data to support that the IP addresses will crack any cases (that is mostly left to hard drives full of porn). Never mind you can’t prove who was at the controls behind the address. And never mind that police can already have ISPs save suspect’s records in three-month intervals.
Privacy advocates are already out.
Gregory Nojeim; senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Director of its Project on Freedom, Security and Technology, told NPR the bill is “the China-style approach to law enforcement.”
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