It saddens me that Republicans are behind something like this. I hope ‘Dingy’ Harry Reid kills it in the Senate.

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

It represents “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill.

I think that bill is pretty damn outrageous. Internet providers have no business logging every move a user makes and then storing it. The potential for abuse is huge. Republicans have gone too far on this one. Privacy has to count for something.

But here’s where it gets really infuriating. And it’s so predictable for the GOP to pull something like this:

To make it politically difficult to oppose, proponents of the data retention requirements dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, even though the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.

“The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”

To be fair, both parties use that tactic but it’s still sick no matter who does it. Whenever the government wants to take away one of our rights or invade our privacy they say it’s for the kids. They just want to protect kids. What about the rest of us? Who the f*ck is protecting us? This bill doesn’t have a damn thing to do with protecting kids. It’s about giving the federal government and law enforcement more power.

I’ve been on board with the Patriot Act and even the warrantless wiretapping by the NSA, but this is a bridge too far. Enough is enough.

This article titled “American charged with hacking after snooping on wife’s emails” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Monday 27th December 2010 14.59 UTC

A Michigan man has been charged under anti-hacking legislation designed to protect trade secrets after logging on to his wife’s email account and discovering she was having an affair.

Leon Walker, 33, faces a trial lawyers say could have significant repercussions given that nearly half of US divorce cases involve some form of snooping, such as reading emails, text messages or social networking.

Walker was charged after opening the Gmail account of his wife, Clara, who was married twice previously. Walker found she was having an affair with her second husband, who had once been arrested for beating her in front of her young son from her first husband.

Walker handed the emails over to the boy’s father, saying he was concerned for the child’s safety. The father sought custody.

“I was doing what I had to do,” Walker told the Detroit Free Press. “We’re talking about putting a child in danger.”

When Clara Walker discovered the emails had been read and passed on she went to the authorities.

The Walkers were divorced earlier this month.

The Oakland County prosecutor, Jessica Cooper, said Walker broke the law by hacking in to his former wife’s account.

Walker says the computer was shared. His former wife claims it was hers alone.

Walker’s lawyer said the prosecutor was “dead wrong” about the law.

“I’ve been a defence attorney for 34 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Leon Weiss told the Detroit Free Press. “This is a hacking statute, the kind of statute they use if you try to break into a government system or private business for some nefarious purpose. It’s to protect against identity fraud, to keep somebody from taking somebody’s intellectual property or trade secrets.”

“I have to ask: Don’t the prosecutors have more important things to do with their time?”

Walker is due to stand trial in February.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information.

His comments came as he gave testimony to Congress regarding the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans’ privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.

Kerr’s testimony that citizens should say goodbye to privacy is gonna drive liberals absolutely crazy, but is he really saying anything new? As far as I can tell privacy has been dead for years. With cell phone cameras, tiny hidden cameras, and other technology, people no longer have an expectation of privacy.

A person is lucky to have any privacy even in their homes and that was the case long before the NSA began wiretapping without a warrant. If your a terrorist then you should be worried, otherwise get over it.

-Chris Jones