I expect to see a slew of reports on yesterday’s Congressional hearing and I can’t post all of them, but will post some. Here’s one by Elizabeth Banker of Zwillinger Genetski:
On January 25th, the House Judiciary Committee’s Crime Subcommittee held a hearing on the topic of mandatory data retention by service providers. The Subcommittee chairman, Representative Sensenbrenner, who declared himself a fan of the “carrot and stick” approach, offered industry a “carrot” if they were willing to come together to develop voluntary standards for data retention, but threatened a “stick” if they were unable to do so. His sentiments were echoed by House Judiciary Chairman and author of last Congress’ data retention bill H.R. 1076, Lamar Smith.
[…]
The hearing left many unanswered questions regarding the types of providers that are intended to be covered by data retention requirements, what types of data would need to be retained, for how long, whether new laws would be required to put in place privacy and security protections, and how much all of this is likely cost and who is going to pay.
Read more on Law Across the Wire and Into the Cloud.