Josh points out that many major blogs, as well as major media outlets, have not been reporting on the SAFETY Act. The legislation was "shot down due to free speech concerns" back in 2006, and apparently the most troubling aspects of the bill weren't even added at that time but were inserted by Lamar Smith, partly due to the public rhetoric of the FBI. Look at ars technica for more info in that regard.

Reader Futile Battle points out that most of these governmental provisions are already in place, in that the government "already has unlimited access to monitor every packet delivered across the internet within the US without a warrant," but that the problem with this bill is the storage burdens it would place on smaller ISPs. "Passing this bill will be a financial burden that unnecessarily increases the cost for the internet to exist, thus would limit users by simply making it unaffordable for low income groups because it will force the base price of internet access to increase."

Here are some interesting reactions from around the Web:

- Readers on Neowin point out the irony that, last month, Lamar Smith's bill protecting the privacy of phone records was passed into law, making his now being the champion of requiring ISP monitoring of Internet records a strange contradiction. According to the press release, the recently approved bill "protects citizens' privacy by criminalizing the fraudulent sale or solicitation of confidential phone records." In this case, though, it is private business use of these records and not governmental intrusion.

-Jim Macdonald at Making Light points out that "In addition to sweeping up and permanently recording all of the conversations and letters of terrorists and kiddie-porn purveyors, this would sweep up everything by everyone else as well -- without a warrant, without probable cause, without recourse, without exception, and without reason."

-Chris Clarke at Pandagon writes, "Imagine the Intellectual Property issues alone: any corporation that uses an outside ISP will have to forego, completely, ever sending any proprietary information by way of email or IM unless they encrypt it, and given how many corporate folks can barely figure out how to use Outlook, that ain't gonna happen any time soon."

-Over at Code Monkey Ramblings, there is this quote: "You are creating a huge repository of personal information that can be easily compromised by criminals. Every unencrypted thing that you do online is vulnerable to data retention policies. That means every username, every password, every blog post, every email, every IM conversation."

-Rob at Say Anything asks, "Who is going to bear the cost of storing all this data? Every email? Every instant message? Every visited website? That adds up to a tremendous amount of data to be stored by an internet service provider. Indefinitely too, and the cost of it all will be paid ultimately by we, the ISP's customers. In order to remain profitable the ISP will have to transfer that expense to customers." He concludes, "It seems to me as though asking ISP's to keep a copy of all our emails is tantamount to the U.S. post office keeping a copy of all of our mail."

-poorcollegeblog draws a link between this move and the legislation from John McCain to "hold webmasters accountable for other users content posted on said websites under penalty of law. So, sites are now responsible for anything posted in comments sections of web pages. Anything."

-And, of course, the ACLU isn't happy. Click the link for their official condemnation, which calls the measure "like swatting a fly with a bazooka."

Coming off my recent series here called Access vs. Censorship, I am interested in tracking the continued development of a bill that could have major ramifications for the ways in which ISPs do business and the privacy of all online users.