I Will Cross This Body Of Water

From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: You look a little heavier. You retaining data?

Characterize anything as a weapon against child porn and you pretty much inoculate it against criticism, so it's not surprising to see Attorney General Alberto Gonzales waving that banner once more as he asked Congress for a law requiring Internet service providers to retain customer records for as long as two years.

...

But retaining information, like retaining water, can be troublesome because information, like water, has a tendency to leak. And a nervous public that has watched gigabytes of personal data get stolen, lost, subpoenaed or secretly shared every month has every right to be skeptical of anything that keeps the record of their private travels and communications out of the bit bucket for any length of time ... no matter what bulletproof banner it's wrapped in.

Skeptical is putting is mildly. Hello, Brave New World of 1984 ... About time I start using an anonymizer.