Alberto Gonzales Is a Fascist Pig!

Just wanted to make that clear.

According to Declan McCullagh at CNET, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department is floating around the idea that Internet Service Providers should be required to retain records of their customers’ internet activities.

Under the the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act of 1996, these companies already have to preserve records of specific customers whenever requested to do so. The new proposal, however, would require them to retain all records of every customer for some as-yet-unspecified period of time.

Can you guess the justification for this? If you’re familiar with how this game is played, you know there are two bogeymen regularly invoked whenever some fascist-wannabe like Alberto Gonzales wants to crush our liberties. This time, it’s not terrorism. It’s the other one:

Justice Department officials endorsed the concept at a private meeting with Internet service providers and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to interviews with multiple people who were present.

“It was raised not once but several times in the meeting, very emphatically,” said Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, which represents small to midsize companies. “We were told, ‘You’re going to have to start thinking about data retention if you don’t want people to think you’re soft on child porn.'”

That, right, it’s for the children.

The scale of this is truly extraordinary. In George Orwell’s 1984 the government watches and listens to literally everything that everyone does. This proposal would require monitoring and records for many Internet activities, including email, web surfing, and chat rooms. It’s 1984 for the Internet.

Actually, that overstates it a bit. The idea being discussed would just require that the records be created, but not that they be turned over to the government. I’m not sure on what conditions that would happen. A few years ago, I would have assumed it would require a subpoena or warrant of some kind, but these days I’m not so sure. Some of the anti-terrorism legislation in the last decade may have made it possible for the government to get these records just by asking.

What’s that you say? This proposal is about exploited children, not terrorism, right? True, but I don’t believe it will stay that way. Once the records exist, they will be available for terrorism investigations as well. Then it can’t be too much longer before the jackbooted thugs at the DEA get involved, followed by hundreds of anti-drug task forces, then everyone else in law enforcement.

The records will also become available to various other unsavory organizations, such as the IRS or the Department of Homeland Security. If that sounds far-fetched, note that Homeland Security is already cashing in on the child protection business with its Operation Predator.

It won’t just be the government, either. Once the records are known to exist, other people will try to get at them. If you sue someone or get sued, you’re only one successful discovery request away from having your email and your web surfing habits picked over by people who are essentially your enemies.

The cost alone of all this record keeping is reason to oppose this program. Supposedly in order to catch the relative handful of children being exploited on the Internet, the government wants private Internet businesses to keep records on 200 million internet users. Even if compliance only costs $1 per user per year, we’re talking 200 million dollars per year. (Compliance startup costs could be much higher.) That’s more than five times the annual budget of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Which do you think will do more to help children?

By the way, did you catch that part where the Justice Department is threatening to launch a smear campaign against its opponents? Anyone who doesn’t want to be involved in the wholesale surveilance of internet users must be “soft on child porn.” I chose my article title to maintain the same sense of fairness and accuracy espoused by the Gonzales’s minions.

(Also, I’ve added “Alberto Gonzales Is a Fascist Pig!” to the metadata in the templates for Windypundit so if the Justice Department ever takes a look at me, they’ll find it on every page. It’s geeky and petty, but it makes me feel better.)

Alberto Gonzales was the guy who wrote the “terror memo” saying it wasn’t against the Geneva convention to essentially torture some of the prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m on record somewhere defending him for it. I thought that as a lawyer being asked a legal question, he was bound by the ethics of his profession to describe what sort of prisoner treatment was legal, without injecting a personal opinion of the morality of it or whether it was good policy. I’m kind of sorry I wrote that now. Given the lack of respect for civil liberties he has as Attorney General, I’m starting to think that maybe he was just soft on torture.

Update: Orin Kerr has doubts about the original story. Maybe I should calm down a bit.