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America to force ISPs to keep data for two years

by on20 February 2009

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Land of the Free, yeah right


The US seems to be competing with the UK in ever more bizarre measures to spy on its citizens.


US senator Lamar Smith, obviously from Texas, has put a law before the Senate that will require ISPs to hang onto their data for two years. Smith claims that his new law will protect children, but similar laws have all been killed off in the committee stage because they have been too broad in scope and packed full of unconstitutional language.


A press release on Cornyn's site said the law is more specific. It demands that ISPs must "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.

Basically they will have to keep a record of which subscriber account was assigned a dynamic IP address at a particular time. However detractors point out that the current system is working fine. ISPs which discard records after a few months often keep tabs on known criminals for much longer at a coppers' request.


However the belief is that armed with two years worth of Internet records it would be possible for authorities to find out who are P2P pirates, or who consistantly visits illegal sites over a long period of time.

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