Senate advances secret plan forcing Internet services to report terror activity
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/senate-advances-secret-plan-forcing-internet-services-to-report-terror-activity/ Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who sponsored the Internet services provision, did not return a call seeking comment. The legislation is modeled after a 2008 law, the Protect Our Children Act. That measure requires Internet companies to report images of child porn, and information identifying who trades it, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. That quasi-government agency then alerts either the FBI or local law enforcement about the identities of online child pornographers. The bill, which does not demand that online companies remove content, requires Internet firms that obtain actual knowledge of any terrorist activity to "provide to the appropriate authorities the facts or circumstances of the alleged terrorist activity," wrote The Washington Post, which was able to obtain a few lines of the bill text. The terrorist activity could be a tweet, a YouTube video, an account, or a communication. - - - Actual child porn is fairly obvious. Terror activity is a much more nebulous concept, and I suspect a significant percentage of the blowhard statements from idiot trolls in posting comments could be theoretically swept into this category. I suspect what's actually going on here is that this is a preliminary to trying to push through legislation banning strong encryption by these services, trying to turn Internet services into monitoring agents for the government. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir
