Snooping Bill Would Force ISPs to Retain and Share Your Browsing History, Credit Card and Bank Info

by: DemandProgress

Wed Aug 17, 2011 at 03:17:26 PM EDT

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie may have a pro-corporate attitude and can care less for our First Amendment rights, but it is important that residents of the Garden State fight back. We need to rally our own New Jersey lawmakers to stand up against this bill that takes away our privacy and hides behind an untrue title.  

"A direct assault on Internet users" is what the ACLU is calling it.  Just before the break a House committee approved HR 1981, a broad new Internet snooping bill.  They want to force Internet service providers to keep track of and retain their customers' information -- including your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses. All residents with Internet access living in New Jersey will have their private information exposed for scrutiny from the government.

They've shamelessly titled it the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act," but our staunchest allies in Congress are calling it what it is: an all-encompassing Internet snooping bill.  ISPs would collect and retain your data whether or not you're accused of a crime.

According to CNET, the "mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well."

You don't have to be a pedophile or a criminal to be targeted; even your divorce case is valid enough for the ISPs to hand over any searches, emails, and activities you've done on the Internet.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill said, "'It represents a data bank of every digital act by every American' that would 'let us find out where every single American visited Web sites."

Click this link to join the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, and 25 other civil liberties and privacy groups in urging Congress to reject this mess of a bill.

And you can watch our new video about the Internet Snooping Bill here.