House Committee Approves Database Surveillance Bill
July 29, 2011 1 Comment
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
July 25, 2011
Legislation that will force Internet providers to store information on all their customers and share it with the federal government and law enforcement agencies was significantly beefed at the last minute yesterday and approved by a U.S. House of Representatives committee.
Under the guise of protecting children from internet pornographers, the House Judiciary committee voted 19-10 to approve a bill that will require Internet Service Providers to store temporarily assigned IP addresses for future government use.
In addition, the bill was re-written yesterday to also include the enforced retention of customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers and bank account numbers.
As Declan McCullagh of CNet reports, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.
“The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”
It represents “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who led Democratic opposition to the bill. The Californian Representative described the legislation as a “mess of a bill” and a “stalking horse for a massive expansion of federal power”.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., noted that the bill would open a Pandora’s box of government abuse.
“This is not about child porn. It never has been and never will be,” Issa said. “This is a convenient way for law enforcement to get what they couldn’t get in the PATRIOT Act.”
Advocates for the legislation include the National Sheriffs’ Association, which has said it “strongly supports” mandatory data retention. The bill has also attracted endorsements from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as well as the FBI.
In a last ditch effort to derail the bill, the ACLU, along with dozens of other privacy watchdog groups penned a letter (PDF) to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith earlier this week, noting that “any data retention mandate is a direct assault on bedrock privacy principles.”
About Luis Miranda
realagenda.wordpress.com 
Why would they want information like that? do they have any idea how many people use th einternet and express their views? they would need a whole state to keep this info in. If they want to knwo my views on this administration I would be glad to tell them, they don’t have to save all of my views on a main website, this is really too invasive. I can see why John Conyers is against it, same with Darrell Issa, they have things to hide, I don’t. I thought America had fallen as far as it could go but I was wrong, we still have a few more feet to drop. If we let this happen we deserve everything we get, and there are also ways of encoding , they are using our own tax dollars to pay for this fiasco? thats like buying a gun so we can be shot with it. l think we ought to use our tax money for better things, a mental evaluation of all Gov. personell from the President right on down to the housekeeper and I’m sure we would not be surprised to find they are all incompetent nincompoops with a huge paranoia complex, The inmates are running the Asylum. We need ot clean house.