Have you ever heard of the “Internet Pornographers Act of 2011”? Until today, I hadn’t either. Here’s what this proposed law provides, according to Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic:
[U]nder language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you’ve been assigned . . . As written, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 doesn’t require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history — being suspected of any crime is enough.
No probable cause is even required. It’s Big Brothers’ dream come true. Now we’ll watch to see whether any Congressional representative who has the willingness to oppose this bill because it violates civil liberties will be accused of approving of child pornography. That is the kind of argument that one might expect in the modern-day Congress.
John Conyers (D-MI) says that the bill is mislabeled (the full title is “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011“): “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”