The House Judiciary has passed a bill that is yet another assault on privacy. And, consistent with past practice, such bills are always named so as to produce a compliant public response.
Proponents of the H.R. 1981 bill have titled it the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It’s believed by some that the legislation will help lift law enforcement out of the “dark ages”. Agents will be able to subpoena IP information instead of needing a court-ordered warrant. Investigators will have a further leg up when identifying child porn distributors and users since the bill ensures that the “footprints of predators are not erased,” according to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Rep. John Conyers of Michigan believes the bill is mislabeled. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes,” he says.
This is so typical. There is a massive invasion of privacy by the Federal government and one of the scary “3Ps” is trotted as the primary purpose of the bill. The three Ps, as all Americans should know by now are pedophilia, pornography and piracy.
Besides civil libertarians, who else is opposed to the bill? The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, EPIC, and others.
Update: More from LifeHacker, including what to do to protect yourself, here.
Your best bet is to find yourself a good VPN provider and hook it up to a good VPN tool to encrypt and route all your internet traffic through a third-party that isn’t your ISP. Virtual Private Networks creates secure, encrypted connections between your computer and a server on the internet, then routes all your internet activity through that server. Your ISP would only really be logging the IP address of your VPN server, which doesn’t give them much of your private info.
Tor is one of the easiest ways to browse anonymously online (even if it isn’t perfect). If you’re a Chrome user, you can even create a simple Tor toggle button to use it only when you really need it. By anonymizing your browsing, your ISPs won’t have a record of what you’ve been doing. They’ll know you were online, but the details won’t be available to them or the police. Of course, there’s no assurance that any anonymous browsing tool will provide full protection but it’s definitely better than nothing at all. If setting up Tor seems a little daunting, Vidalia can help simplify the process. You’ll also want to read our guide on protecting your privacy when downloading for more suggestions.