House panel approves broadened ISP snooping bill | Privacy Inc. – CNET News

Declan McCullagh of CNET is reporting on a bill to require ISPs to maintain massive records on their users. According to the article this bill requires commercial Internet providers to retain “customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses”.

They are calling it the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011″ in a flagrent attempt to make it politically difficult to vote against it even though the bill has noting directly to do with Internet pornography or protecting children.

Were this bill to become law, it might cause real problems for the growth of public Wi-Fi where there is no user authentication. That would be a huge leap backwards for a very possitive trend of late.

Of course, criminals will continue to be trivially able to circumvent such tracking efforts making this primarily a mechanism for gathering information on innocent persons without any hint of suspicion or probably cause.

It is absolutely un-American to require every citizen to submit to continuous tracking and monitoring on the possibility that some tiny fraction of us will commit a crime. Law enforcement always lobbies hard for such provisions. Make sure your voice is heard that you value your privacy and your rights.

Contact your Representitive and Senators if this is something you feel strongly about.

congress · data retention · legislation · logging · Privacy · surveillance · tracking

This makes a good case for why it concerns me that we seem to be willing to automate all kinds of things that can really impact us without including real security.

‘War Texting’ Attack Hacks Car Alarm System – Dark Reading

cars · hacking · security

Matt Blaze analyzes why the widespread use of cryptography has had almsost no impact on our practical ability to do wiretaps and gather information under legitimate court orders. Not too technical and absolutely worth a read.

Matt Blaze: Wiretapping and Cryptography Today:

cryptography · security · surveillance · wiretap