A bill that was introduced last week by two Texas Republicans would require all ISPs and anyone providing Internet access otherwise (that’s you and me, reader, if you have a Wi-Fi router) to keep logs of activity for up to two years. This bill aims to seek out those sick individuals who are trafficking child porn. The Internet SAFETY (Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act) Act, introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith and Sen. John Cornyn, threw out some numbers that are quite startling.
“Of the nearly 600,000 images of graphic child pornography found online and reported to law enforcement officials, only 2,100 of these children have been identified and rescued,” Rep. Smith said in a statement. “Federal, state and local law enforcement officials have reached a digital dead end in their battle against the online sexual exploitation of children.”
The U.S. Internet Service Provider Association’s (USISPA) executive director, Kate Dean, seems a bit weary of the bill as it’s written and had this to say about it.
“Congress will need to examine many tough issues when legislating a mandatory data retention scheme. Among other considerations, Congress will need to decide which providers and what information is covered, reconcile how such a requirement will comport with today’s and tomorrow’s technologies, and determine the effect on consumers, their privacy and their online security, not to mention the financial impact on companies in this uncertain economy.”
If this bill were to pass, people who are found guilty of hosting servers that have child porn would face up to 10 years in jail, but those who are bank rolling the operation would get up to 20 years.
It would be nice if internet policing weren’t all being pushed onto ISP’s, many of who are struggling as it is to stay around.
How about going after the people who produce this smut to begin with, instead of adding another 10 stacks of paperwork to already creaking ISP’s?
This is very reactive, meaning parsing logs after the child porn images have been viewed. A more proactive response is needed, e.g. build a web crawler to hunt for hashes of known child porn images, then flag and report servers that are hosting these images. Can’t be too tough, just ask Google for some source code.
I do wonder how much of this is about “protecting our children”. Sounds more like Big Brother and the brain police trying to get control of the internet via fear. A technique we seen done to death in the last 8 years.
The authoritarian types around the world realize their the big misstep made in underestimating the internet.
If they just keep this plan to all of the ISP’s within the borders of Texas they will catch about 90% of the child predators so let us let them do it… to themselves.
If this passes I think everyone should print out their yearly log and fedex every single page to these two particular republicans houses. When they get ‘literally’ mountains of packages of billions of pages of log files I think that would put a stop to stupid policy real fast.