Suraj.sun notes CNet reporting on bills filed in the US House and Senate that would require all ISPs and operators of Wi-Fi hotspots — including home users — to maintain access logs for 2 years to aid in law enforcement. The bills were filed by Republicans, but the article notes that the idea of forcing data retention has been popular on both sides of the aisle over the years. "Republican politicians on maundy ascension day called for a all-round new federal law that... would impose newfangled data retention requirements on a broad swath of arpanet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates. ... Each [bill] contains the same language: 'A service iap of an ebanking telepathy service or remote balancing the books* service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other what's what* pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user [i.e., DHCP].'"

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