Europe Rises Up Against ACTA - BlackListedNews.com

V

What about even more radical approach...

The Daily Bell - BBC: Let's Kill the Internet and Start Over

V

House panel approves ISP snooping bill HR 1981 - New York Daily News

Conspiracy theorists and digital rights activists, check your calendars.

Do they say 1984?

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee approved a bill Thursday that would require Internet service providers to keep a record of their customers' web activity for 12 months.

H.R. 1981 - The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 - was approved on a 19 to 10 vote, despite serious privacy concerns voiced from both sides of the aisle and privacy activists.

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House panel, called the bill "mislabeled," according the CNET.

"This is not protecting children from Internet pornography," Conyers said. "It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes."

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, previously criticized the bill, saying, "It can be amended, but I don't think it can be fixed. . It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits and I'm not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children."

Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) who sponsored the bill, said not enacting it "would keep our law enforcement officials in the dark ages."

A late rewrite of the bill reportedly requires ISPs to store customers' names, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers and temporarily assigned IP addresses for 1 year. The panel rejected an amendment clarifying that only IP addresses be retained by a 7 to 16 vote.

Supporters hope that the information will help police carry out investigations.

Democratic opposition leader Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California argued that because the bill only applies to "commercial" ISPs, criminals could skirt the legislation by using the Internet "anonymously" at Web cafes and libraries.

Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston for the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation called the bill "un-American" in a statement.

"Such a scheme would be as objectionable to our founders as the requiring of licenses for printing presses or the banning of anonymous pamphlets," Bankston said.