| They want your ISP! (and ours as well..) |
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| Thursday, 19 October 2006 | |||||
 Many things have been carried out for our security (or, at least, for US citizens security) and no form of persuasion is more effective than fear, especially if it involves an unknown threat that in any moment could hit us, our family or our country. But one day we ‘d wonder which is the risk we should fear most: the threat of terrorism or the loss of freedom? And even admitting that the most dangerous peril would be terrorism, how can we be sure that such restrictive measures would be really effective in protecting us? While meditating on these issues, let’s make a note on last initiative by FBI director Robert Mueller who on Tuesday called on Internet service providers to record their customers' online activities, anticipating law enforcements on privacy issue that will come into effect next year, USA Today reported During a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Boston, he declared that "Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms," and he got on saying "All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims. This is not the first initiative by Bush administration officials to force private company to record customer’s sensitive data, archive and disclose them to the authorities , and this is not the first case we are dealing with US attempts to get information about people living and operating both inside and outside the United States of America. Anyway this time something is different, because mid-term elections are closer and closer and it is such a controversial topic for both US political parties that the debate on Data Retention legislation will be postponed to 2007, maybe because it is still unclear what this data Retention law would bring about .. One proposal requires that ISPs would register the companies that sell domain names, to maintain records too, and it seems that according to the FBI it would be desirable to force search engines to keep logs. At the moment, ISPs don’t archive log files unless they could be useful for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. But companies can act differently when they are involved by police in some official investigation. This practice is called data preservation and it is regulated by an act approved in 1996 that requires Internet providers to keep any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity." A data retention rule that has been approved in Europe and will become effective in 2008, includes the monitoring over a wide amount of traffic and location data such as: the identities of the customers' correspondents; the date, time and duration of phone calls, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls or e-mail messages; and the location of the device used for the communications. But theoretically, "content" of the communications won’t be retained. What we have to do now, is just waiting until mid-term elections will be over and then see which new rules will be adopted for data restrain.. We can’t look forward it!
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