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Bill Would Make ISPs Keep Data On Users
The SAFETY Act, aimed at online child predators, would give Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broad discretion to write data collection and retention rules for Internet service providers.
(By Mark Wilson -- Getty Images)
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"The Smith proposal would give the attorney general carte blanche to require service providers to keep all information imaginable on every one of their users," said Kate Dean, executive director of the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, which represents the nine major providers, including AOL, AT&T, Microsoft, Yahoo and Comcast.
Dean also said the measure could affect a wide range of service providers. "Does this cover wi-fi providers and coffee shops and hotels? Schools and libraries? And, most importantly, the government itself, because that remains unclear."
John Morris, policy director for the Center for Technology and Democracy, said the risks for civil liberties would be enormous if a bill that extends to content of e-mails, computer instant messaging and Web surfing habits. "I would expect that the Justice Department would impose an extremely broad data-retention mandate," he said.
The sheer volume of data could be overwhelming. The amount of data in a week's worth of short instant messages alone would fill two Libraries of Congress, Morris said. Dean said the data retention could impose new costs on innovation. "Any blanket data-retention requirement would dramatically affect new services that companies bring to the market," she said, referring to potential new storage requirements.
The issues proliferate, she said: What if there's a technical failure? Would the data need to be kept "live" for quicker law enforcement access or stored on tapes? Would the data be kept for one year, 20 years or indefinitely?
Weinstein, a computer scientist who focuses on technology's impact, said people interested in child porn could easily use computer viruses to direct innocent people's machines to download the images and then shoot the images back to the perpetrators through obscure channels that are difficult to trace.
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
