http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20084939-281/house-panel-approves-broadened-isp-snooping-bill/
The Republican controlled House Committee has passed the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, The bill has nothing to do with protecting children from porn.
If approved, the bill would require commercial ISPs to retain customer data and IP addresses for at least a year. That would allow law enforcement (and others) to take an IP address and timestamp and easily track it back to the credit card or person which paid for the service. In technical terms, what this means is to retain DHCP and PPoE logs (DHCP is the device that hands out IP addresses)
From a practical point of view, this is already done. As more and more people move to DSL, Cable TV and Fiber connections, the internet providers have been switching to non-dynamic IP addresses. Your IP address stays the same for as long as you have an account (unless there is some major networking change or the router is swapped out). I’ve always assumed that the big ISPs already forward that data in real time to Homeland Security.
Dynamic IP tracking was a problem with dialup – you may get an IP address for something that happened (Dialup keeps RADIUS logs that tie accounts to phone numbers to IP addresses), but who is using what phone line might change every few minutes. If you did actually find a log of the actual connection, at best it might give the login account that was used – the phone number to make the call into the internet is highly unreliable as it is fairly trivial for a “bad guy” to fake caller ID. If a password has been stolen, it may be hard to prove who actually used the account. This is further complicated in that most dialup ISPs bought the dialup service from a third party – so the company with the RADIUS logs is not the company that knows who owns the account. Which ISP is using which phone line at any time is constantly changing.
This bill has nothing to do with Child Porn – it has everything to do with people stealing and downloading movies and music and making it easy for the RIAA/MPAA investigators to track down the people doing it and end the practice. We must do it to Protect the Children, after all.
I don’t have a problem with the bill itself – I do have a problem with the name of the bill.
Another reason for one to use something called TOR. When configured CORRECTLY TOR allows some anonimity. As with most tools, TOR can be used for good AND bad.
Way back a long time ago, one of the early “anonymizer” services was discovered to actually be funded by the CIA. When it was discovered, the explanation was the CIA was doing it to allow people in China to bypass the Great Firewall of China
I operate from the assumption that everything I do can be monitored and decrypted. The government built the Internet – It’s not like they’re going to leave any part of it without a back door.
AND…. Just to be clear, NO!!! I DO NOT support kiddie porn. I do however support the concept of freedom and freedom from undue and unwarranted Suveillance. TOR is used by several government entities and many of its personnel when traveling to preserve the anonymity and integrity of internet communications when on public or unfriendly newtworks.
Of all the things I despise about New York’s government, one of the things they have right is that they have a clause in their constitution that requires that the title of a bill be an accurate summary of its contents.
When I came to the realization that electronic privacy was an illusion – it was about the same time that I realized banking was a joke (no real money) and government ‘money’ was just numbers on a piece of paper. (Douche bags in wing-tips flock together). To me sum other measures.
Took me some other measures.