For much of the last decade the U.S. government has been trying to force data retention requirements on ISPs, most frequently under the banner of fighting child pornography. New bills seem to pop up every year or so, though privacy advocates have traditionally beaten such efforts back. Mandatory ISP data retention was something you'll recall was a priority for the Bush/Gonzales Justice Department, and (much like warrantless wiretapping) is now being championed by the Obama Administration Justice Department.
The latest effort is H.R. 1981: Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act (pdf), a bill that would require ISPs retain user data for 18 months. Its primary champion is SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, so SOPA's defeat is drawing renewed attention to the bill. While Smith pushed SOPA (an Internet filtering effort) as a jobs creator, he's pushing HR 1981 (an expansion of domestic surveillance authority) as an effort to stop child porn.
Civil rights groups charge the law isn't needed because existing laws are more than suitable to target and stop child pornographers. Law enforcement and intelligence supports the law because they claim they lack the adequate tools to monitor suspects, despite a decade of unprecedented new intelligence law (read: Patriot Act). As Sonic CEO Dane Jasper recently explained, the biggest problem may be that storing all of that data makes a delicious hacking target:
Do the wheels of justice or investigation move too slowly, and should data be retained for a long time to allow for legitimate investigation? No, there are already tools in place that law enforcement can easily use to ask ISPs to preserve log information of real online criminals. The 1996 Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act allows law enforcement to require an ISP to keep data for 90 days upon law enforcement request, giving time for a legitimate search warrant to be reviewed by a judge and issued. But, keeping data on every online user for a full year presents far too much potential for abuse.
It has been interesting to watch folks jostled awake by SOPA suddenly noticing all of the bad laws and trade agreements currently in play. Of course if they had been paying attention all along, laws and trade agreements like these wouldn't get so easily shoveled through the legislative process.read comment(s)