From The Sponsor of SOPA: PCIP – Hand Over Your Privacy, Today!

PCIP is making its way to the House of Representatives, where it will present the biggest challenge to the privacy of individual citizens since the Patriot Act.

Texas Representative Lamar Smith (R) is on something of a hot streak lately when it comes to sponsoring legislation that can potentially wreck large portions of the Internet. His earlier work has been heavily publicized as of late – the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA. SOPA, a bill that would attempt to thwart piracy by turning over control of the Internet, effectively, to judges and lawyers acting at the behest of Hollywood “content creators” was named insidiously enough – who would want to support piracy, after all? Calling the bill the “Wreck The DNS System Act of 2012″ wouldn’t quite have the same ring to it, nor would the “Shutdown All The Sites” bill.

The next act for Mr. Smith is far, far more impressive for what it could potentially do to the Internet. The “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011“, or PCIP, would require every ISP in the United States to keep extremely detailed logs on all online activities of all users for a period of 18 months. This includes what you type, usernames, passwords, credit card information you enter when shopping, chat logs, every interaction you have with a networked computer. Or tablet. Or cell phone. All of it. This information would be tied to an individual’s account with their ISP – whether that be a traditional high speed carrier, phone company, or mobile provider.

All of this information would be stored in a single database. Information from the database could be accessed by law enforcement on mere suspicion of wrongful activity. No probable cause needs to be established, just a judge somewhere in the country who is willing to give law enforcement a warrant. The opportunity for abuse of such a system is almost impossible to put into words. Law enforcement has had a long history in modern times of perverting many good intentions of many laws passed. The Patriot Act, for example, has been used to investigate drug users, gather comprehensive information on visitors to Las Vegas, and force journalists to give up their notes on interviews & sources. In what ways could a law like this be abused?

Then of course there is the security aspect. No longer would credit card companies or online storefronts need to be hacked to gain access to some of the valuable credit card information of an American. A single breech of this database could leak enough information about any given individual to create, for all intents and purposes, a clone of you – your social security number, name, driver’s license, credit card information, e-mail account password, website visitation history, social networking data, download logs – everything that defines you as who you are. Just what is the remediation for someone who falls victim to that?

Mr. Smith, to his credit, went there when it came to naming this bill and how to frame its use:

“Child pornography may be the fastest growing crime in America, increasing an average 150 percent per year,” stated Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) in a news release. “These disturbing images litter the Internet, and pedophiles can purchase, view or exchange this material with virtual anonymity. Investigators need the assistance of ISPs to identify users and distributors of online child pornography.”

This is all very true, but much like where SOPA would be tantamount to ripping up the interstate highway system to stop drug trafficking, PCIP would be tantamount to forcing every American user of the Internet to wear a monitoring ankle bracelet on the off chance they do something wrong. Also, in the venerable world of thirty second talking points, opposing this bill is opposing the opposition to child pornography, and who wants to be caught doing that?