Recently, "progressives" Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, among others, signed on with Lamar Smith to sponsor HR 1981, the Protecting children from Internet Pornographers Act. ACLU is opposed to this act as it casts an inordinately wide net:
...Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.) introduced H.R. 1981 the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011." Section four of this legislation would impose sweeping requirements on internet companies, forcing them to keep records on their customers for 18 months — impacting millions of individuals who have no connection to the sexual exploitation of children whatsoever. It doesn't have to go down like this.
This is serious threat to our privacy. The ACLU has long been concerned about companies that follow us around the web and track our viewing habits for the purposes of advertising. They use this tracking to build personal profiles about us that can be widely shared. Forcing companies to retain data for long periods would bolster this practice. It would also make it much easier for the government to track everything we do online. No company would be able to promise not to record your visit — that would be barred by law. Respect for your anonymity online would be a thing of the past.
The legislation applies to a broad swath of internet sites and services. It would include all email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail), all cloud computing services (Google-web based services like Picasa and Google Docs), all social networking sites and a whole lot more. In layman's terms, the bill applies to every site that allows you to communicate with others or stores or processes your data — almost everybody.
HR 1981 came out of Committee last week, approved by a 19-10 margin after a major rewrite. According to CNET, the rewrite
... expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren was a major opponent of the bill and offered several amendments to limit it. According to the National Journal:
When none of her major amendments passed, Lofgren offered a final poke in the eye. Lofgren proposed renaming the bill the “Keep Every American’s Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act of 2011.” That also failed.
“I think we ought to say what we’re doing rather than pretend that this is about child pornography,” she said.
So much for the Fourth Amendment and any shreds of rights to privacy that might remain. This bill will come up for a vote before the full House after the August recess. We need to make sure it fails.
You can track progress on the bill here:
http://www.govtrack.us/...
