Saturday, June 3

Goose stepping towards a police state…

In the 6/1 USAToday:

Top law enforcement officials have asked leading Internet companies to keep histories of the activities of Web users for up to two years to assist in criminal investigations of child pornography and terrorism, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller outlined their request to executives from Google, Microsoft, AOL, Comcast, Verizon and others Friday in a private meeting at the Justice Department. The department has scheduled more discussions as early as Friday. Last week's meeting was first reported by CNET, an online news service.

The meetings reflect a new approach by law enforcement in anti-terrorism efforts. Previously, the Justice Department had invoked the need for data retention only to battle child pornography. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Internet traffic has become increasingly critical to terrorism investigations, too.

Via Ed Bott's All your browsing history are belong to U.S.. I especially like

Honest to God, these people piss me off.

Pretty much my way of thinking too.

And from the IP list that I subscribe to, and Ed also lists this email from Brett Glass, which points out stuff from an ISP's point of view.

The belief that everything and everyone must be monitored in the hope of preventing possible criminal activity is a hallmark of a police state. Is this what the US is coming to? If so, the 9/11 terrorists have won. By killing fewer people than died in the recent earthquake, they have given an irresponsible government an excuse to destroy our freedom, and have successfully cowed the populace into allowing it to happen.

This indicates that they had talks about this past Friday.

This indicates that the talks have fallen through.

I also like Techdirt's coverage and The Head Lemur's assignment of the Idiot of the Internet as well.

Which should mean that, if the DOJ actually goes through with their threat, that we will be seeing legislation introduced to force this. If this gets any kind of public discussion, I plan on putting my 2 cents worth in to both senators and my representative. Reminds me of the night I set up the computer to fax a senate committee on the DMCA. I might have gotten through about 10% of them, as I kept getting busy signals, and a couple of bad phone numbers.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/03/2006 05:10:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post