Hacker News Reader

Comment by SODaniel | Hacker News Reader

Definitely not a deliberate lie. The bill amends previous bills on the topic by adding the retention of IP-adresses etc.

If I was unclear in the post I am very sorry and will amend the post.

That said the core of the post stand. The linking of currently stored data with IP-addresses creates a direct link from internet usage to personal data. Something that should scare most people.

View on HN

IP addresses were already preserved:

> (E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002703----...

The new law explicitly amends the previous law so that IP address records are stored for 18 months, as opposed to 90 days.

But the part everybody's getting worked up over is the tracking of Internet activity, which is not part of current law, and is not part of the bill in question. I have no idea where that part came from, so I'd be glad if you could make that clear.

I am actually thinking that you are in fact correct here. Though most articles on the bills in question describe them as 'Tracking internet usage' (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/house-committee-approv... , http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/07/29/congress-child-p... etc) what the bill in question (and previous bills on the subject) states is the mandatory storage of assigned IP-addresses.

Now I guess one could assume that our ISP's save our browser history, however there is no mandate in this bill for access to that data.

I will look over the blog post and make edits to clarify this.

Thank you very much for pointing this out!

I have updated the post to reflect the fact that the amendment or previous bill does not explicitly refer to tracking of internet habits. I will continue to investigate the bills and available data etc.

I would like to thank you for pointing this out and I took the liberty of thanking you in my update of the post.

I think it's great that you're actively open to feedback and fixing it, but basically it means that you started out writing about stuff you, apparently, knew nothing about, so just assumed things.

That sounds a lot like FUD tactics. The internet freedom camp seems to apply these more and more, seriously blurring the debate and screwing it over. Why are you doing these things? Why do you act as bad as the people crafting these laws? Why do you allow both camps in this debate to remove all truth altogether?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com