Privacy busting legislation a “stalking horse for a massive expansion of federal power”
Legislation
that will force Internet providers to store information on all their
customers and share it with the federal government and law enforcement
agencies was significantly beefed at the last minute yesterday and
approved by a U.S. House of Representatives committee.
Under the guise of protecting children from internet pornographers, the House Judiciary committee voted 19-10
to approve a bill that will require Internet Service Providers to store
temporarily assigned IP addresses for future government use.
In
addition, the bill was re-written yesterday to also include the
enforced retention of customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit
card numbers and bank account numbers.
As
Declan McCullagh of CNet reports, the panel rejected an amendment that
would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.
“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.”
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, who led Democratic opposition to the bill. The
Californian Representative described the legislation as a “mess of a
bill” and a “stalking horse for a massive expansion of federal power”.
