Once upon a time, the concept of mandatory data retention seemed almost reasonable. What's the big difference between an ISP keeping data on users for a year instead of six months? Rep. Diana DeGette & co spent a large portion of last year talking about babies being raped thanks to the Internet and how that could be prevented by data retention -- and if they're right, who could be against the idea? Well, it turns out that the Bush administration wants far more than just that. In a private meeting with industry groups last week, Assistant Attorney General Rachel Brand and other officials said they wanted to target Web sites that let users upload images or video: http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6163679.html This is consistent with a Politech post from January, in which I said that search engines, domain registrars, and Web hosting services have also been talked about as data retention targets: http://www.politechbot.com/2007/01/24/not-just-isps/ Unfortunately, we don't know exactly what the Justice Department has in mind. (A real problem is that discussions on this topic have been both vague and secretive. No language has been circulated, at least as of last week, so we can only speculate.) -Declan _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]