The so-called “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act of 2009," or SAFETY Act, was floated in both the House and Senate on Thursday. Among other things, it demands: “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."
In short, if approved, everybody from employers to ISPs to coffee shops and universities would be required to keep logs of all data associated with IP addresses assigned randomly to individual users – from e-mail logins to search queries to sites visited, legal experts said.
“This provides a historical picture of individuals that I think a lot of people think would find creepy," said Albert Gidari Jr., a Seattle attorney who successfully defended Google in the government's bid to acquire billions of customer-search queries. “When you're on the phone, there may be a phone record of what you called, but it doesn't contain what you said. These proposals allow the government to get access to activity that they would never have before, because providers don't keep it because of volume and cost. The European Union has a similar law directed solely at ISPs.
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