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America debates data retention

Tags:
Data Retention,
Compliance

Declan McCullagh CNET News

Published: 18 Apr 2006 18:00 BST

...members include representatives of AOL, Verizon, BellSouth and EarthLink.

Dean said she's not sure whether US data retention proposals being discussed are likely to mandate mere address recording or also require the storage of the contents of email messages and Web pages visited. A representative of one large ISP who did not want to be quoted expressed concern that content could be swept up into legislation — and cited the privacy and security risks of having such a massive data warehouse available.

Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak, who's the senior Democrat on the House oversight and investigations subcommittee, expressed scepticism about forcible data retention requirements in an interview on Thursday. He said he would not "be in a rush to support" data retention requirements and would rather see the private sector come up with a better solution.

"I'm against this child porn stuff, but at the same time, let's not further erode the rights of the American people," Stupak said. "That's what I'll be looking for. I'll be looking at [proposed laws] with a very close, constitutional eye as to the validity of the proposals... and I'd like to hear from private industry what they can do."

The European precedent
One question is how closely US proposals will follow those that Europe already has adopted. In December, the European Parliament approved a UK-backed requirement saying that communications providers in its 25 member countries — several of which had enacted their own data retention laws already — must retain customer data for a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years.

The Europe-wide requirement applies to a wide variety of traffic and location data, including the identities of the customers' correspondents; the date, time, and duration of phone calls, VoIP calls, or email messages; and the location of the device used for the communications. But the content of the communications is not supposed to be retained. The rules are expected to take effect in 2008.

According to a memo accompanying the proposed rules, European politicians approved the rules because not all operators of Internet and communications services were storing information about citizens' activities to the extent necessary for law enforcement and national security.

"These developments are making it much harder for public authorities to fulfil their duties in preventing and combating organised crime and terrorism, and easier for criminals to communicate with each other without the fear that their communications data can be used by law enforcement authorities to thwart them," the memo said.

Some US companies are so alarmed by this requirement that they've talked about scaling back their operations in Ireland, which boasts some of the region's most aggressive data retention laws. Joe Macri, managing director of Microsoft Ireland, told the Irish Times last month: "Irish legislation is going beyond what is required from an EU perspective and is going to put significant additional costs on businesses... While we respect and understand the needs and concerns of the law enforcement agencies, there is also a need to take personal privacy concerns and the broader needs of business into consideration."

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute, was the member of the Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee who asked Chertoff about data retention last month.

In an interview this week, Harper warned that mandatory data retention may cause more harm than good. "The true criminals will go and use random Wi-Fi nodes where you can get anonymous access," he said. "You haven't done anything but increase surveillance of law-abiding citizens."

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report.