Re: Enforcing ISP data harvesting is simply a smoke screen
"IMHO, this bill is simply to provide a way for law enforcement to construct a plausible trail of evidence that can be used in courts. The data is ALREADY
harvested and stored en masse by the security services but can't be presented in courts for fear of exposing the true extent of the surveillance dragnet."
Partially true, but you forget that the mandatory data retention regime makes it possible to track an internet subscriber by proving who was assigned a particular IP address at time xxx:yyy;:zzz.
Without the law, ISPs caring about their customers' privacy could simply delete data not necessary to retain for billing purposes.
Mandatory data retention is a dangerous slippery slope: It assumes that data not required for billing must be kept in order to facilitate a future government investigation because individually targeted monitoring is too expensive.
It's like saying that every citizen must carry a GPS and be trackable by the government on the assumption that the information might be useful to law enforcement.
But the worst consequence of DR is that the same info is available in private civil cases.
Copyright trolling -- suing individual account subscribers is only possible because the ISPs must keep IP addresses.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
