[Infowarrior] - Rep. Lamer Smith at it again....

[Richard Forno]

Gotta love the Mrs Lovejoy-esque formal title of the bill, eh?  ---- rick

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57371426-281/anti-sopa-forces-have-isp-snooping-bill-in-their-crosshairs/

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It took an Internet-wide outcry from millions of voters to prompt Rep. Lamar Smith, author of the Stop Online Piracy Act, to postpone a vote on the controversial Hollywood-backed bill.

Now Smith, a conservative Texas Republican, is being targeted a second time: for championing legislation that would require Internet service providers to keep track of their customers, in case police want to review those logs in the future. His bill is called H.R. 1981.

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After repeated prodding by the Justice Department and other police agencies, Smith's committee approved H.R. 1981 by a divided 19 to 10 vote last July.

H.R. 1981 represents "a data bank of every digital act by every American" that would "let us find out where every single American visited Web sites," Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill, warned at the time. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and previous supporter of data retention, changed his mind and now opposes it.

The latest version of H.R. 1981 expands the information that commercial Internet providers would be required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote in July, the House Judiciary committee rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

Even though H.R. 1981 is titled the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act," it would give police the power to review the companies' user logs for nearly any crime. Even Smith, during a January 2011 hearing, pointed to the problems of "illegal gambling, cigarette and prescription drug distribution, and child exploitation." Civil litigants, for instance in divorce cases, might also be able to gain access to the logs.



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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.