IPv6 May Not Be Necessary

You may remember my warning about the unexpected uses that IPv6 will be put to by the governments of the world in tracking the activities and locations of regular citizens. In one of those, "Oh great, it's worse than I even thought and I thought I was already as cynical as I needed to be" moments, I've found out about the latest attempted outrage by the oldsters and petty tin-horn two-bit tyrants and Big Brother wannabes in our congress regarding our use of the internet and tracking us in cyberspace and meatspace at the same time and it makes me so mad I could spit nails at a UFC guy just to get the satisfaction of taking some action.

Apparently they're not content to just let the Echelon program sniff our packets and record whatever it can find since that's not necessarily going to get everything there is so they have a new internet snooping bill waiting action in the US congress that would require all our ISPs to keep a record of everything we do online including all the encrypted stuff that we all thought was private like our credit card numbers and names and addresses and passwords and IDs and even the temporary IP addresses we're assigned in this IPv4 world of dynamic addresses unless you pay the extra bucks for a static address.
 
This whole charade is being touted as the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act," but there's no question that it's really an all-encompassing internet snooping bill. It's like they think that since DARPA was part of starting the internet that they own everything we do using it even without bothering to get court orders to do what amounts to wiretaps on everyone all the time no matter what we're doing or where we are. It's stunning that it cleared a committee vote so it's time to gear up a protest to your representative - if you have one, since so many of them seem to be more interested in representing themselves as re-electable than in representing their constituents - and let them know that maintaining electronic logs of everything that everyone in the country is doing all the time is not only unreasonable and un-Constitutional, but it makes for being un-electable too. As the music and movie industries are finally beginning to realize, it's not good marketing to treat all of your customers as thieves, and the congress needs to find out that it's not a good idea to treat all your constituents as criminals either since we're the ones who vote them in and out and they don't have any right to force companies like Comcast and AT&T and even Google to collect and maintain all this private and probably sensitive information when there aren't many companies or government agencies that don't get hacked like the BART system was to expose their customers' data all over the web for everyone else to see and I don't know very many people who want everything they do online to be published by hackers so that their Moms can find out that they were shopping for a gift on Amazon that they haven't gotten yet, let alone even more sensitives stuff than that.

We need to fight this one so we have some kind of precedent before IPv6 shows up with the black helicopters.


Posted by Gyro Gearloose

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