Have you ever heard of the Wiretap Act?  The Electronic Frontier Foundation defines it as an act that “broadly prohibits the intentional interception, use, or disclosure of wire and electronic communications unless a statutory exception applies.” This one legal hurdle keeps what happens between you and the monitor in front of you private.  Recently, the FBI has been pushing ISPs to keep track of the 432 million web hits a day for up to two years.  This includes your IP address, which defines your computer when it is connected to the internet, and the destination URL, or web page, that you visit.  The latter of these two items requires a monitoring service that violates the Wiretap act.

Declan McCullagh from CNET recently participated in the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, and has written an article detailing the request made by the FBI.  Most interesting is a point from an attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine, John Seiver, who stated that the purpose for this national push is to determine who visits two specific URLs they are investigating.  You heard that, a national change in infrastructure management and monitoring just for two URLs.

Despite this and other events like Google letting the NSA in it’s doors, at least we aren’t regulated like Chinese citizens, where their own government tries to hack their email accounts.