Leave it to those ol’ Texan Republicans to stir things up. Two weeks ago, the Internet gave a collective gasp when Senator John Cornyn and Representative Lamar Smith introduced a bill to propose the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth (SAFETY) Act.
The bill, if enacted, would impose harsher penalties for the possession and distribution of child pornography. However, online denizens were brandishing digital pitchforks over one particular stipulation:
"A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."
The bill’s incredibly vague rhetoric led critics to draw conspiratorial speculations on its intended purpose.
Many interpreted the bill as 1984 in the flesh: everyone from major Internet service providers down to every Joe Shmoe with a wireless home setup would be required to keep meticulous logs of all user activities on their network, ostensibly on their own dime. This data would then be sent straight to some shadowy government agency who would turn around and sell the information to the RIAA, telemarketers, etc.
No more free movies, raunchy blog posts or celebrity sex tapes; that loveable tramp known as the Internet would finally be forced to settle down, start a family and take on a mortgage.
Of course, like when anything with a shred of sensationalism hits the Internet, the bill’s purported invasiveness was blown out of proportion.
“ As long as there are procedural protections in place covering when somebody can serve these subpoenas, then that’s where the protections lie,” says Bruce Boyden, Assistant Professor of Law at Marquette University.
Boyden says that users concerned that their e-mail correspondences may fall prey to prying eyes have little to fear, as IP addresses would be the only information collected.
An Internet Protocol, or IP Address, is a unique numeric code assigned to Internet users. Acting as an electronic footprint, investigators use this data to track down pedophiles in the real world.
The Internet SAFETY Act raises interesting questions about Canada’s own data retention policies.
Under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, commercial organizations, including Internet service providers are required to set clear guidelines regarding their data retention policies. Companies can only retain information for a clearly defined purpose and period of time. Canadians can choose which private organizations have access to their files and can file complaints accordingly. By comparison, Boyden points out that American ISPs have no obligation to delete any user data they come across. Therefore, Canadians can feel secure that their online identities are safe from outside abuse. Significant legislative changes would be required for ISPs to begin harvesting IP addresses.
Maybe they should. Despite all the tinfoil-hat paranoia surrounding data retention, the truth is that such information would actually be useful to quell online child exploitation in both Canada and the U.S.
Rosalind Prober is strongly in favour of such legislation. The president of Beyond Borders, a children’s rights group with international ties, Prober believes that ISPs should be required to maintain and provide user data in order to catch sexual predators as a matter of professional accountability.
“Part of being in any business that [can] involve crime unfortunately involves putting money in your business to stop it. Data retention is something ISPs are not keen on doing because of the cost, but it is something that they should be mandated to do, because it’s necessary.”
Prober says that, as the Internet is an enabling industry, ISPs should consider data retention costs the price of doing business within a medium that is rife with child exploitation.
“We cannot rescue children who are being sexually abused if the data is gone when police find out about it. Any common, everyday pedophile is now at the park and online,” says Prober.
This isn’t to say that data retention is the key to stopping online child pornography. After all, child pornography didn’t originate on the Internet; unfortunately, its inherent anonymity allows such filth to fester freely. Clever individuals will most likely always find some sort of way to skirt the law and engage in unlawful activities.
But with an estimated 65,000 pedophiles actively trading child pornography in Canada, a little data retention could go a long way.
We can afford to loosen our privacy laws if it helps to tighten the noose around those who would exploit innocent children.