Never Censored

Well, Bush is at it again, now pushing for even more Internet surveillance. I'll go ahead and give you some good excerpts from CNET's article on it. I added some emphasis on things I'll discuss later.

The Bush administration [is proposing] that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate

...data retention would be valuable in investigating terrorism, child pornography and other crimes.

...ask Internet service providers how much it would cost to record details on their subscribers for two years. At the very least, the companies would be required to keep logs for police of which customer is assigned a specific Internet address.

(By "Internet address" they mean IP address, which is a unique identifier that denotes who or what is accessing a website.)

...a mandatory data retention bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that would let the attorney general dictate what must be stored and for how long.

Often invoking terrorism and child pornography as justifications, the administration has argued that Internet providers must install backdoors for surveillance and has called for routers to be redesigned for easier eavesdropping.

Heh, personally, I think packet sniffing is pretty damn easy already, but whatever.

David Weekly, a San Francisco-area entrepreneur who founded popular Wiki-creation site PBWiki.com, said the Justice Department's proposal would be routinely evaded by people who use overseas sites to upload images.

Amen, bruthah-- more on that later.

So yeah, what do ya think? At face value, keeping information about what people do online is a great idea-- especially for the reasons they give for doing so. After all, who can argue against preventing "child pornography" and "terrorism?" In theory, if you mandated everyone to simply record IP addresses of everyone who visited/uploaded anything, then you'd have a fool-proof return-to-sender path for each image or piece of potential "terror" uploaded. It'd be kind of like taking fingerprints for anyone who ever visits your website.

But there's a slight problem: IP addresses are far from foolproof. Not only can they be forged in certain instances, but even when they're 100% percent valid, they don't necessarily represent the actual network that's responsible for action. That means that even though there's a clear path the the direct uploader of content, it doesn't actually mean the direct uploader is the actual person responsible for uploading that content.

Let me give another analogy for the non-technically savvy, in the form of C.S.I.: