Saw a tweet from Leo Laporte earlier today about Republican lawmakers resurrecting a bill that will require all internet service providers, including Wi-Fi access points in the public and at home “for two years to aid police investigations.” The bill is a rehash of some legislation that was brought up about 3 years ago by Democrats.
So what does it mean? For all coffee shops, universities, book stores, hotels, public parks and so on, they will all be responsible for keeping track of every single connection that is made to them via wireless device and log it. It also means that if you have a Wi-Fi network set up in your own home, you will also be held responsible for the same.
The bill is called the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act, aka the Internet SAFETY Act. It goes without saying that I’m for child safety, but law enforcement and congress needs to get smarter about how they track and arrest people who are exploiting children. This law is basically operating under the assumption that we’re all criminals who need to be tracked. It’s an open-ended wire tap on everyone. Everywhere.
So far I haven’t seen much response from any civil liberties groups yet, but I’d expect it soon, especially since they were all over it in 2006.
What do you think? Is this another case of losing liberties in exchange for safety? Shouldn’t we expect more funding for law enforcement to create special units to cover this sort of crime rather than open ended tracking of all of us?
Hah, i’d love to see them try to enforce that one, even if they passed it you can bet that within 24 hours a software maker would have a program to hide your info from access points, just not sure this is the best way to go about it. It does raise an interesting question though, if you have an open wifi access point and someone does something illegal using it, can you be held responsible?
This bill sucks, to say the least. It’s always ass-hats using the cover of “the children, we must protect the children” that make things worse for adults. Mind you, I’m not defending child abusers here but why do we only care about children? Is humanity worthless once it’s not cute and cuddly anymore? Anyways, any attempts to hold a wi-fi provider legally responsible for what someone else did with the connection in a public place is insane! It was this same logic that doomed public telephone booths back in the early 1990’s. (Well, that and cell phones.) Because “some” people used phones to do drug deals, the cops were able to force phone companies to shut off phones at nights in certain areas. So dealers got pagers but if you were a lonely traveler needing to make a call to say a hotel or a gas station late at night, you were out of luck for something that was not your fault. Lame!