In May, a bipartisan group of congressmen, including Virginia’s Rep. Randy Forbes and DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, joined Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas by cosponsoring HR 1801, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. Much as its title suggests, HR 1801 is intended to protect children from predators by giving law enforcement officials additional tools for investigating and punishing Internet crimes against children.
Despite its bipartisan support, HR 1801 has drawn criticism for what some describe as overreach and its potential to invade the privacy of law-abiding citizens. The pertinent section of the legislation, Section Four, amends Section 2703 of Chapter 18 of the U.S. Code to say:
A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).
The American Civil Liberties Union says Section Four goes too far:
This is serious threat to our privacy. The ACLU has long been concerned about companies that follow us around the web and track our viewing habits for the purposes of advertising. They use this tracking to build personal profiles about us that can be widely shared. Forcing companies to retain data for long periods would bolster this practice. It would also make it much easier for the government to track everything we do online. No company would be able to promise not to record your visit — that would be barred by law. Respect for your anonymity online would be a thing of the past.
The legislation applies to a broad swath of internet sites and services. It would include all email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail), all cloud computing services (Google-web based services like Picasa and Google Docs), all social networking sites and a whole lot more. In layman’s terms, the bill applies to every site that allows you to communicate with others or stores or processes your data — almost everybody.
This law comes at a time when U.S. laws in the digital privacy area are woefully out of date. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (covering the internet) dates back to 1986 — before we had a world wide web. And the changes to the law would not be limited to use for child pornography investigations. Law enforcement would be allowed to access the information to investigate less serious crimes, and intelligence agencies could incorporate the information into their intelligence gathering. Private litigants — from divorce lawyers to copyright holders — would also be able to access it.
Rep. Forbes strongly disagrees:
As it stands now, investigators do not have adequate tools to track down these pedophiles that prey on our nation’s children. We owe it to our nation’s most vulnerable citizens to make sure this issue is addressed.
I am proud to cosponsor legislation to help investigators track down dangerous pedophiles and protect children from sexual exploitation.
Bedford County Sheriff Mike Brown also strongly disagrees. Sheriff Brown, founder of Operation Blue Ridge Thunder, a Bedford-based taskforce that targets Internet predators and is responsible for more than 60 criminal cases since its creation in 1998, testified in support of HR 1801 before the House Judiciary Committee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security last week.
In his prepared remarks for Rep. Forbes’ subcommittee, Sheriff Brown noted that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) typically maintain this information for between only seven and thirty days. Often by the time law enforcement officers attempt to investigate Internet predators, the identifying information needed from ISPs is long gone.
Less controversial provisions in HR 1801 also increase penalties for individuals who profit from child pornography and stronger protections for child-victims of Internet crimes.
Considering the privacy questions many conservatives have raised regarding the Patriot Act, does the ACLU have a point? Is HR 1801 opening the door for Big Brother to look over your shoulder while you’re online or is it, as Rep. Forbes, Sheriff Brown and a bipartisan coalition in the U.S. House believes, a critical and long-overdue tool that America’s law-enforcement community needs to protect the least among us?
No one wants to protect Internet predators—a charge the ACLU emphatically denies while acknowledging that better ways of investigating these crimes exist that do not require a potential invasion of the general public’s privacy. Yet with incidents of child pornography increasing every year (it is one of America’s fastest growing crimes), does it not make sense to update our laws protecting children from these monsters?
If ISPs do not retain data for more than a month, it seems likely that at least some of the growth in Internet-based crimes against children could be the result of repeat offenders who fell through the cracks after ISPs dumped the information necessary for law enforcement to continue its investigations. Is there a way to balance the law-abiding public’s online privacy while also protecting children? Rep. Forbes and Sheriff Brown believe HR 1801 does just that and if anyone knows how to keep children safe, it’s Sheriff Brown.
