We need your records for 2 years! Why?....Um...because we're the government!

A Bill is making it's way to through the Senate. The Bill would preserve internet records to be kept by ISP's for 2 years. Also, this wouldn't just be for your home ISP's, this is for any Wi-Fi hot spot, coffee shop, or anywhere there's a signal. It's being proposed by the Republicans in the Senate and nobody else. Why? Well, this Bill would mean that ALL of our private data (Purcheses, emails, and the like) would be on servers during that whole time. They want all of this data saved to aid police investiagtions in child pornography cases (More likely to spy on people who are suspected terrorists, but you probably already guess that).

The Bill sounds fine on the surface level only. The dowside to this Bill is that it leaves all of our info in places that can be accessed by hackers. It's happened plenty of times before, at colleges and even some big corperations. Or somebody who has access to servers like these (Probably hundreds and thousands of people in the U.S. alone) can decide to find for data and sell it to identity theives. Or steal your data for themselves. The other big problem is that it's far too expansive. I mean coffee shops? Who's downloading porn at coffee shops? If your in a coffee shop and you see somebody downloading child porn, do the police need anything more then eye witness acounts and, oh I don't know, THE COMPUTER the suspect was using? Wouldn't that be slam dunk enough?

What these Republicans fail to understand is that the soultion to the problem isn't spying on everybody to catch a couple of bad guys. The soultion is in regulating search engines and P2P networks. If you design a service like Google or Bittorrent to not recognize certain search terms, like child pornography, then how would anybody be able to find it? If you put way more time into pervention and blocking the material, then it has a harder time getting out there. But no, as always the Republican solution (Pardon me, the American solution) is to spy on all of you little pricks out there. It all goes back to my earlier blog, more focus on crime prevention and less on crime punishment.