A bill was introduced last week to both the House and Senate that would require all operators of wireless internet access points to maintain access logs for no less than two years to aid in law enforcement.
This would be extremely difficult for me to comply with; if it would be hard for me, how hard will it be for my non-tech-savvy parents?
There are several problems with this bill. First is the cost – storing two years’ worth of access log files uses a lot of space. Some families could conceivably spend more storing access logs than they spent on their computer.
Second is that most people simply don’t have the expertise required to comply with this legislation, meaning most families would be required to hire an IT professional to maintain their network. How are working-class families supposed to pay for that?
Third is that the legislation will utterly fail at what it is designed to do – access logs only record MAC addresses, which are easily forged and (even if they’re not forged) are often not unique. In other words, they want access logs to be able to show if someone used a particular access point to do something illegal – but the logs don’t prove anything, because the data they record can be forged.
There is an article on Slashdot discussing the problems with this proposed legislation:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/20/131224
I urge you to contact your Senators and House Representatives and ask them to vote against this proposed legislation.