Invading your privacy in the name of ‘the children’

Congress feels a need to be in control. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle we are talking about. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that Americans will buy almost any lame excuse they are sold for allowing Congress to pry into their private lives at will. Often, such prying is done in the name of “protecting children.” The latest attempt to scrape away what few privacy rights you may have comes in the from of two proposals that would force internet service providers to keep track of you on behalf of the high and mighty Boy and Girls of the Beltway.

Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

What does Congress really do to protect children? They have encouraged a culture of irresponsible behavior that makes the problems of children worse for decades now. I fail to understand. Please explain to me how spying on Americans is going to do anything to make the lives of children better. It may make it easier to punish people for various crimes after the fact. That will not help children who may already have had some crime committed against them by an adult. That isn’t really what such bills are about though. They are about control and power over the lives of Americans.

Two bills have been introduced so far–S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or Internet Safety Act.

Each contains the same language: “A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”

Translated, the Internet Safety Act applies not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and so on–but also to the tens of millions of homes with Wi-Fi access points or wired routers that use the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (That method is called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP.)

“Everyone has to keep such information,” says Albert Gidari, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm in Seattle who specializes in this area of electronic privacy law.

The legal definition of electronic communication service is “any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications.” The U.S. Justice Department’s position is that any service “that provides others with means of communicating electronically” qualifies.

That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too.

Why would Congress want to invade the privacy of hundreds of millions of Americans like this? Because you’ll let them. Conceptually speaking, privacy is the twin sister of autonomy and autonomy is the cousin to a sickly dying idea called independence. These are the “children” I want to protect. These most precious ideas are more important than a nanny state that absolves us of all responsibility for our own actions.

Your expectation of privacy has been dying for decades in America. Technology is one reason but the growth of government is a bigger reason. Link the two together and you get a very dangerous environment where privacy is nearly impossible. Once it is completely dead, many will find they are judged over and over again on their daily activities, choices, relationships and so on. Government cannot protect your children from anything as nebulous as human nature. It will never be able to unless we voluntarily allow ourselves to be chipped, mind controlled and put in work camps. Some days I don’t think we’re that far away from creating such a society.

When children are put in jail for sending a nude cell phone photo of themselves to someone else I think we need to shift direction. When we’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent and therefore a file containing all our data becomes a good idea, I think we need to shift direction. When we strip away civil rights long held dear for the lie that it will protect the children I think we need to shift direction.

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