{"id":4101,"date":"2012-01-26T17:21:41","date_gmt":"2012-01-26T22:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=4101"},"modified":"2012-01-26T17:21:41","modified_gmt":"2012-01-26T22:21:41","slug":"big-brother-likes-to-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2012\/01\/big-brother-likes-to-watch.html","title":{"rendered":"Big Brother Likes to Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"big-brother-poster\"<\/a>SOPA and PIPA may be dead, but the battle is far from over.\u00a0 The dust had barely settled from the online community’s successful revolt against Hollywood’s attempt to toss out due process in an effort to protect it’s Luddite-like business model when Rep. Lamar Smith, SOPA’s author, introduced the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t even sound related does it?\u00a0 Further, it’s obviously about protecting children, and who could be against that? Well, that’s kind of the point. The problem is, this bill doesn’t really introduce any additional protections for children or make any bold new strides to stamp out child porn.\u00a0 At least not directly.<\/p>\n

What the bill does require is that your ISP maintain a record of what IP addresses are assigned to you for 18 months.\u00a0 It is required to keep those records sealed, unless the government, and only the government, requests them.<\/p>\n

Some sites are reporting the bill requires ISPs to keep a record of every site you visit.\u00a0 That’s not true, unless you live in Hawaii, where a separate and unrelated state bill<\/a> has been proposed requiring your ISP to keep tabs on your every YouTube view and Facebook stalking venture.\u00a0 The federal bill makes no such requirement.<\/p>\n

This means the Fed won’t have the ability under this bill to demand your Internet history as part of an investigation.\u00a0 But, if it is monitoring network traffic or if it seizes a web server and the logs on that server, they can trace your activity back to your house.<\/p>\n

So in theory, FBI agents bust a child porn provider, find out that someone at the address 123.123.123.123 has been a heavy user, and grab the ISP records to find out that on the day in question, that address was assigned to your house.\u00a0 Then you hear a knock on the door.\u00a0 Okay, if you’re into child porn, then someone should knock at your door and haul your ass away.\u00a0 But what if it wasn’t you?\u00a0 What if your neighbor jacked your WiFi, and he’s the real pervert?\u00a0 What if you own a coffee shop and provide free WiFi to your customers?\u00a0 Are you now suspect because of their actions?<\/p>\n

And you’d have to be completely naive to think this tactic only applies to child porn.\u00a0 Gee, have you been to Megaupload or Pirate Bay lately?\u00a0 And there’s the SOPA\/PIPA tie in.\u00a0 Once this data is being collected and is at the government’s disposal, it will be used for all manner of things.\u00a0 This isn’t about protecting the children. That’s just the ruse to get the law passed.<\/p>\n

And before someone argues that if you’ve got nothing to hide you shouldn’t be worried… that’s not the point.\u00a0 The Forth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy.\u00a0 The Supreme Court recently ruled<\/a> that your car can’t be GPS tagged without a warrant.\u00a0 This means the police can’t decide to electronically track and log wherever you go in the real world so that\u00a0 just in case they uncover a crime, they can go back and see who was near the scene when it was committed.\u00a0 The virtual world should not be different.<\/p>\n

As ill-conceived as they were, SOPA and PIPA were at least upfront about their intentions and motivations.\u00a0 Hiding behind the specter of child porn to erode constitutional rights is despicable.\u00a0 The children deserve better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New child porn bill is actually a bill to force ISPs to track your IP addresses. This will only be used to prosecute child pornographers. And if you buy that, I have a bridge to sell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[61,114,72,60,63],"class_list":["post-4101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-fourth-amendment","tag-intellectual-property-law","tag-internet","tag-isp","tag-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4101"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4110,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4101\/revisions\/4110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}