"WASHINGTON--The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.
FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users' "origin and destination information," a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.
At Thursday's meeting (PDF) of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, which was created by Congress and organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Motta stressed that the bureau was not asking that content data, such as the text of e-mail messages, be retained.
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"The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records...addressing, routing, signaling of the communication," Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added "there's going to be a balance of what industry can bear...He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data."
Motta pointed to a 2006 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which called for the "retention of customer subscriber information, and source and destination information for a minimum specified reasonable period of time so that it will be available to the law enforcement community."
I am all for getting child porn distributors and such, but consider what the Bush administration has done in the name of the war on terror and tell me, would you trust them to not abuse this power? Consider what Nixon did with the limited tools he had and imagine what he and his plumbers would have done with such power. Would you have trusted this program to Nixon or Bush? Would you trust Obama not to abuse this power? I trust no one - that is part of my job description. So if the POTUS wanted to know who a journalist was communicating with and wanted copies of those communications, what would stop the FBI from providing it?
