Decius wrote:
The police could constantly surveil everything that everyone ever does all the time so that in the event that a crime is committed they can find out what happened. They could require that tracking devices and surveillance systems be installed all over the place. This sort of data retention is a part of that puzzle. The advocates of this sort of practice constantly act as if the next piece of this total surviellance infrastructure that they want to erect is no big deal... It is a big deal and it is an invasion of privacy... in aggregate it is a huge deal and these people have absolutely no idea where they would draw the line.

For reference, this is the actual proposed amendment in the house and senate bills:

(h) Retention of Certain Records and Information- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.

To make matters even more complex.. I'm not sure what this would actually achieve in the absence of additional data retention mandates. DHCP address on the resources mentioned are usually in rfc1918 space and s-nat'd or proxied out to the public Internet. Without retention of logs at the gateway, the dhcp logs this would mandate the retention of would be mostly useless. You would get a record of what hardware mac addresses were present at the time in question, but not necessarily be able to connect then to a specific set of IP transactions..

The way I read this, an individual running a public wifi network that wasn't retaining DHCP logs could wind up in prison for up to 20 years if someone did some evil while using it. Even though if the individual did had the logs, it still wouldn't be possible to connect a transaction to a specific machine without the presence of gateway traffic logs, which there is no mandate to retain... And even if those logs were present too, you still couldn't connect the network transaction to an individual without requiring entities offering public network services to verify identities of users before enabling them the ability to access the public Internet..

That's not reasonable.

RE: Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police | Politics and Law - CNET News