United Liberty

The Atlantic is reporting on a bill working its way through Congress that could potentially be disastrous for civil liberties and privacy on the Internet.  The innocuously-named bill, the “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011” requires that all ISPs maintain 12-month records of literally every element of your Internet activity.  To obtain this info, all police have to do is ask for it - even for other crimes entirely unrelated to child porn.

This is the kind of nice-sounding, yet massively over-broad law that creates far more problems that it intends to solve.  And yet it’s hardly surprising that the government is making a power grab under the banner of “protecting children”.  That’s right up there with “helping poor people” and “stopping terrorism” in the list of excuses the state has used as a cover for invading our rights.

Clearly, this bill cannot become law.  Anything we can do to alert people to it would certainly go a long way to shedding a light on this very problematic legistation.

Thanks go to Jayvie Canono (@OneFineJay) on Twitter for pointing me to this.