New House Bills mandates ISPs to log Users Web History

The House Judiciary committee has approved legislation mandating Internet Service Providers to log a user's web history. This will maintain records for 12 months at one time containing customer names, IP addresses, telephone numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, bank accounts. It is designed to allow Law Enforcement to monitor activity on the internet.

The American Civil Liberties Union is opposed to the legislation due to violating a person's right to privacy.

If this legislation were to become law then anonymity is no longer protected. LEO will know who you are and what you are doing. H.R. 1981 This is merely proposed legislation and is a long way from the approval process.
It may not survive the process; or it could make it to the president's desk.
Time to fire up TOR and use proxies to browse...
Got news for everybody....most ISPs already maintain detailed weblogs....
What I'm more interested in hearing if LE (or worse FBI/NSA/CIA) will be able to obtain those without a warrant or not. It is VERY expensive to build a detailed activity record of a single "suspect", you have to download the logs, then find and isolate that particular user's activities. It takes time. I do it where I work with a different web-based system, and the functions are somewhat limited....and it's very painstaking with a lot of moving parts.

What I fear may happen at some point....direct dump of the data to a master server where a supercomputer will do the parsing, and look for phrases or activities on certain sites...then they just need a computer to identify potential criminal (or subersive) activities and go arrest then.
Time to fire up TOR and use proxies to browse... Originally Posted by Spirit13
can you recommend a good proxy
TOR is a proxy. If you google "the tor project" you will see that this is used by the goverment, the law etc to conceal your true location on the net.. you can also google for proxy sites in general then confgure your browser to use them.

Anytime you can throw "Da man" off a bit.. even if the location it appears you are at is the next closest big city in your state.. that helps. Also, if you choose to manually pick a proxy, have a list of 5+ proxies and change them daily.
Got news for everybody....most ISPs already maintain detailed weblogs....
What I'm more interested in hearing if LE (or worse FBI/NSA/CIA) will be able to obtain those without a warrant or not. It is VERY expensive to build a detailed activity record of a single "suspect", you have to download the logs, then find and isolate that particular user's activities. It takes time. I do it where I work with a different web-based system, and the functions are somewhat limited....and it's very painstaking with a lot of moving parts.

What I fear may happen at some point....direct dump of the data to a master server where a supercomputer will do the parsing, and look for phrases or activities on certain sites...then they just need a computer to identify potential criminal (or subersive) activities and go arrest then. Originally Posted by TexanAtPlay
I have many years working for ISP's (3 in Houston) the easy part is getting the IP and time stamp something happened, then using the search feature of the DHCP logs to reveal whose log in name was in user ON that IP at that time... then its all pre-filtered.

The hard part that costs a lot is web traffic logs.. most ISP's do not log that since people surf a lot the array of HD's needed for say.. 6 months of traffic would fill 1`2 a tennis court of any decent sized ISP. That cost alone for the ISP stops them from doing it for more than maybe 1 month tops...

In this modern age of wireless, a laptop, extension cord with a small multi tap power strip and a wireless coffee house is all I need to randomize things.. can sit there for hours searching for fun.

There is one coffee house I know of where plugs are plentiful, and a lady could sit and arrange things from there. All she needs is her laptop and cell phone, both can be powered off 1 A/C plug, phone relays through the laptop USB. Nice thing is that she can relax, arrange sessions then go to them in the evening.. or if she can find the holy grail of areas, (wifi coffee house to hang at, with 2-3 hotels/motels nearby for random locations) she could set up sessions, go to location A, do a session, return to coffee house and chill till its time for session #2 at location B etc.. all the while she does not live in that area.. she lives 6 miles away.
JohnnyPool's Avatar
Gotta love those sever logs ;? )
Logging in under a proxy service to conceal you identity makes sense at this time; especially in many communities and employers where your web browsing is suspect to scrutiny. In seems reasonable that HR 1981 may also attempt to address the ambiguity issue to such an extent that even proxy internet service to conceal your ip address, etc is also taken into consideration.

For those interested then GOOGLE - proxy sites and begin using the services to connect to sites that you want to remain confidential (and certainly user coffee houses, etc.)

GOOGLE - House Judiciary Committee HR 1981, for more interesting links to the proposed legislation in regards to losing more personal freedom on the internet, anonymity. L8r glglgl
Proxies work fairly well... as I stated above.. sometimes just using a free public wifi that does not block sites works well too.. most the ones I know of are nothing more than a cable modem or High speed DSL with a linksys or Dlink router behind it.. no logging.. most of their routers are not secure I poke around in them sometimes..
TOR project update -
I installed it on my windows netbook which I run FireFox... what it does is you run TOR and it does its connection then launches the browser in stealth mode.

easy to install... I would recommend it for all your naughty browsing
I've been using TOR Vidallia for a couple of years now, definitely gives me some peace of mind but I still remain vigilant in keeping my information secure.

I do have a question regarding dropbox...what is the best way to encrypt or secure this information? I am leery of putting anything in my dropbox until I know I have it configured safely.
Also, I'm a huge fan of Chrome but Tor doesn't give you the option to use it with Chrome. Here's a workaround for that:

http://lifehacker.com/5614732/create...ymous-browsing
Obi_Wan's Avatar
Very interesting thread, and certainly something to think about.
That's nothing new about keeping record of internet history right... not surprised.
sjdude's Avatar
hi

Proxies, TOR,I2P are good but... watch this....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPd-HiEvhhw

more than likely if you end up in LE custody, your laptop or cell phone will end up in
LE custody, and they will use the services of a company like above to expose you....

TO make matters more difficult for them you should also 'encrpyt' whatever you can... before storing it on your device.... look for truecrypt and ecryptfs on google...

SJ