Byte Rights: While You Were Out

Apparently, I am an Internet child-raping fiend. How else could I be against something called the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act? It's even supported by sheriffs associations and the Department of Justice, among others, and your representative may be voting on it soon (hint, hint).

Turns out, what's at issue here has nothing to do with children and sex—in fact, it would be particularly hard to find a child pornographer with this law. It's a callous way of making anyone concerned about online freedom sound like a slavering pervert, an old trick of over-the-top lawmakers. The naming of the act is often inverse to how horrible it is. If they wanted to dump toxins in the water supply, they'd call it the Save Kittens Act and claim the opposition were cat-hating Hitlers.

What the law is really about is data retention. Data retention policies mandate that ISPs keep data on all their customers for some predetermined time (usually around a year), in case the police pop by and want to look at someone's records. Of course, the problem is that if you know you're going to be committing a crime, you just go somewhere exempt from data retention like a library or coffee shop. As a tool for catching hardened criminals, this is less than useless. But for snooping on people who might file-share or coordinate a protest, it's perfect. The data they want gathered isn't just your temporary IP at all times, it's also your name, address, phone number, credit card, and bank account.

I don't actually want to allege that the government wants to spy on its citizens by looking for any shade of gray or dissent online, but acts like these make it hard not to wonder.

Click to expand...