If writing to Senators or House Representatives:
The Honorable (full name)
Date
Your name
Your company’s name
Your address line 1
Your address line 2
City, State, Zip
Dear Senator (last name): —OR— Dear Representative (last name):
As your constituent, with a vested interest in the protection of
independent Internet service, I am deeply concerned about the Attorney
General and FBI considering logging by ISPs.
While the general public perceives that the big ten (AT&T, Verizon,
TimeWarner, Comcast, Cox, Qwest, MSN, EarthLink, BellSouth, and AOL) are
the only ISPs in America, the truth is that there are about 1000 smaller
independent ISP with a staff of 10 or less people who are providing
broadband internet to about 2% of the US population. (We are also
providing quite a few jobs, too).
On any given ISP system in a month, there are many, many gigabytes of
traffic. According to MSNBC, "Internet users around the world send an
estimated 60 billion e-mails every day."
How would a small ISP such as myself log all the email and sites that my
customers visit? Do you realize how much space, power, hardware,
expense, and labor that would require? How do we secure that
information? What happens if that information -- to be stored for 24
months -- gets damaged, pilfered, or lost?
There are also problems with the IP address system, whereby many smaller
ISPs do not give a specific, static IP number to a user. The IP address
system, IPv4 is running out of numbers, so many ISPs conserve them by
using a system called NAT, that has some inherent security for the
network and users built-in. But NAT would not allow a traceable log of
data that the AG & FBI are looking for.
Please be watchful that these types of requirements, while perhaps
possible by the big 10, would be burdensome to the other 99% of the
providers in the US.
Sincerely,
Your name
Contact information:
http://www.wispa.org <http://www.ii4a.org/>
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