Congress out to spy on your ‘puter
Liberty Monday, August 1st, 2011
By JULIAN SANCHEZ, NYPost.com
If Congress had to name laws honestly, it would be called the “Forcing Your Internet Provider to Spy On You Just In Case You’re a Criminal Act of 2011″ — a costly, invasive mandate that even the co-author of the Patriot Act, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), says “runs roughshod over the rights of people who use the Internet.”
But because it’s disguised as the “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act,” the House Judiciary Committee approved it last week by a wide margin — even though it’s got little to do with child porn and won’t do much to protect kids.
The centerpiece of this ill-conceived law is a sweeping requirement that commercial Internet providers retain a one-year log of all the temporary Internet Protocol addresses they assign to their users, along with customer-identification information. The Justice Department says this will help track down child-porn peddlers by linking online activity and real-world identities. But the government would be able to access that sensitive data for all kinds of investigations, most of which would have nothing to do with child porn.
Traditionally, citizens in a free society are presumed innocent. If the police want to look through your computer files, the Fourth Amendment requires them to show a judge that there’s “probable cause” to suspect wrongdoing. The PCIPA turns that assumption on its head, treating every Internet user as a presumptive criminal and exploiting a serious Fourth Amendment loophole.
The Constitution protects privacy against government intrusion, but it doesn’t stop the government from forcing private companies to do its dirty work. Records held by a corporation don’t enjoy the same Fourth Amendment protection as does the data on your personal computer — so a search warrant isn’t necessary.
But there’s no evidence that law enforcement has a systematic problem obtaining Internet records in child-porn investigations. A Government Accountability Office report released in March concluded that Internet providers usually could provide subpoenaed records — and in the few cases where they couldn’t, investigators could often obtain them by other means.
To read more, visit: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/congress_out_to_spy_on_your_puter_z8eadkV4ktqtKfanoon1eL
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