Clock Running on Adopting Voluntary Data Retention Rules, ISPs Told by Congressional Leaders
Congress doesn’t want to mandate a data retention enforcement policy to help law enforcement but will very soon if it doesn’t come up with a voluntary standard, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders said at a House Judiciary hearing Tuesday. The message is loud and clear, replied Kate Dean, executive director of the United States Internet Service Provider Association after the hearing.
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"I am tossing you a carrot,” said Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who ran the hearing. “If you aren’t a good rabbit, we will all start throwing the stick at you.” Chairman Emeritus Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., promised to contact Attorney General Eric Holder after the hearing to move on a mandate. “Studying this for years is ridiculous,” he said.
A uniform data retention policy would preserve critical evidence so police can halt child pornography, which was almost eradicated in the 1980s but surged with the Internet, said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. One in every three children receive unsolicited sexual content online while one in six is solicited, he said. “The loss of childhood innocence, or worse, life, is too high a price to pay for not retaining data for a certain amount of time."
The problem, said Dean, is the cost of data retention policies on business. Dean said she could not speak for her association as to how long it would take members to agree on a voluntary data retention policy. “We all heard the members say the industry must come together,” she said. The association is eager to work with lawmakers on devising a policy, she added. Its members are concerned about the costs of designing and building a massive database that could hold all the information required by a data retention policy, said Dean. A uniform policy also will create questions on Internet privacy of users and pose technology and security risks at retrieving data and hurt attempts to help law enforcement. Other questions are what information must be retained -- just the websites a user visits, for example -- and how long the data must be kept. Dean promised action: “We have been given carrots and sticks by the Chairman, and I need to go back to my members to discuss this.”