Trei, Peter wrote:

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Cyber Security Plan Contemplates U.S. Data Retention Law http://online.securityfocus.com/news/486

Internet service providers may be forced into wholesale spying on their customers as part of the White House's strategy for securing cyberspace.

By Kevin Poulsen, Jun 18 2002 3:46PM

An early draft of the White House's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace envisions the same kind of mandatory customer data collection and retention by U.S. Internet service providers as was recently enacted in Europe, according to sources who have reviewed portions of the plan.

In recent weeks, the administration has begun doling out bits and pieces of a draft of the strategy to technology industry members and advocacy groups. A federal data retention law is suggested briefly in a section drafted in part by the U.S. Justice Department.

If the U.S. wasn't in an undeclared 'war', this would be considered an unfunded mandate. Does anyone realize the cost involved? Think of all the spam that needs to be recorded for posterity. ISPs don't currently record the type of information that this is talking about. What customer data backup is being performed by ISPs is by and large done by disk mirroring and is not kept permanently. I did a bit of back of the envelope calculation and the cost in the U.S. approaches half a billion dollars a year in additional backup costs a year without any CALEA type impact to make it easy for law enforcment to do data mining. The estimate could easily be low by a factor of 5-10. AOL of course would be hit by 40 percent of this though, not to mention a nice tax on MSN. Call it ten cents a day per customer in fee increases to record all that spam for review by big brother. I feel safer already. Whats next, censorship?