Declan McCullagh filed this report after yesterday’s hearing on updating ECPA:
A historic lobbying effort today to update U.S. privacy laws for the 21st century seemed to be in danger of derailment by a law enforcement-backed proposal to require Internet companies and e-mail providers to keep records of what their users are doing online.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of a key House of Representatives subcommittee, said this morning that it was time to resuscitate the idea of the government mandating data retention. Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, had drafted a mandatory logging proposal seven years ago that included prison terms for company executives who failed to comply. A law enforcement representative said today some form of data retention should be attached to the privacy bill.
Read more on CNET. Having watched the hearing and then read a number of tweets about it, I think it’s important for people to discriminate between proposals concerning data retention and those concerning requests for data preservation in individual cases.
Thanks to Joe Cadillic for this link.