The latest bit of legislative chicanery from James “Doesn’t Make a Lick of” Sensenbrenner:

A prominent Republican on Capitol Hill has prepared legislation that would rewrite Internet privacy rules by requiring that logs of Americans’ online activities be stored, CNET News.com has learned.

The proposal comes just weeks after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Internet service providers should retain records of user activities for a “reasonable amount of time,” a move that represented a dramatic shift in the Bush administration’s views on privacy.

Wisconsin Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is proposing that ISPs be required to record information about Americans’ online activities so that police can more easily “conduct criminal investigations.” Executives at companies that fail to comply would be fined and imprisoned for up to one year.

In addition, Sensenbrenner’s legislation–expected to be announced as early as this week–also would create a federal felony targeted at bloggers, search engines, e-mail service providers and many other Web sites. It’s aimed at any site that might have “reason to believe” it facilitates access to child pornography–through hyperlinks or a discussion forum, for instance.

Note how vague the child pornography provision is written:

Whoever, being an Internet content hosting provider or email service provider, knowingly engages in any conduct the provider knows or has reason to believe facilitates access to, or the possession of, child pornography shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

Now think about what that means. If you run a discussion board or a blog, and someone posts a link to child porn in your comments, perhaps deep in your archives, if federal prosecutors determine you “had reason to believe” that link exists, you could well be looking at 10 years in prison.

No, I don’t think U.S. attorneys would use that language to go after Joe Blogger. But I could certainly see them using it to go after a sex blog or porn-related discussion board. And the idea that the government wants to create a database of the websites you’re visiting ought to creep you the hell out. What’s left that wouldn’t be subject to data mining?

Of course, this isn’t all that surprising, given that it comes from the same congressman who wants to toss people in jail for two years for failling to report someone they suspect might have have distributed marijuana.

Meanwhile, NSA officials are apparently snooping in on the phone calls of journalists, to find out who’s leaking the fact that NSA is snooping in on American citizens.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 4:23 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.