1 That's Sen. John Cornyn, NRSC Chairman to you, mister.

2 The paranoid conspiracy-theory part of me says the feds are already tracking everything and just want to make it legal.  No way our government would do that to its citizens, though, right?  (Actually, I think it's more likely that most of us are inconsequential enough that it's not worth the trouble of tracking us.)

There's an interesting tidbit in the bills (House version here, Senate version here) "A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user." So if you're not using a system that assigns IP addresses using DHCP within your home network (we don't, for most of our home network) you don't have to maintain records for what actually goes to the individual computers. This provides a nice out for people in a large household - the feds will know that the furry bondage porn you downloaded made it as far as your house, but as long as you properly cover your tracks (which you're already doing, I'm sure, heaven forbid your mom comes down to the basement and actually sees what you do on the Internet) and you're not using DHCP to distribute network traffic once it passes your router, they're not going to know whether it was you, your little brother, or your mom who downloaded it, because you did a good job of not keeping records in-house. Which I would think would make it more difficult to prosecute for whatever it is they think you did.

Can someone please explain to me why 'youth' is in the title of the bill? Does that mean that the first time information gathered from this bill is used to prosecute a crime that doesn't involve a 'youth', the defendant can argue that the bill doesn't apply to him? Before Gabe and alex jump in, yeah, I know that's ridiculous. I'm just so irked that our 'youth' is being exploited to pass a nanny bill and attain their precious 'SAFETY' acronym. And that this will be touted as a 'bipartisan victory' when it passes.

3 Hey, completely and utterly OT, but can anyone point me in the direction of sane, well-reasoned, articles/papers/books on term limits?

4 That's offtopic? 

5

Well, OK, I guess it could be construed as on topic but my mind wasn't going in that direction when I typed the above

6

OK, this is OT:

The media (in this case, Terry Moran of ABC's Nightline) goes way past bias and well into 1960s-style, Obama-as-the-Beatles mania--a taste:

"I like to say that, in some ways, Barack Obama is the first President since George Washington to be taking a step down into the Oval Office."

I think someone said this before Moran (or maybe it was him during the campaign), but for the love of Christ, are these people completely out of their minds?!

There's a lot more here:

http://wizbangblog.com/content/2009/02/21/terry-morans-explanation-why-obamas-first-month-is-being-panned.php

7 Before Gabe and alex jump in, yeah, I know that's ridiculous.

Actually, I vaguely recall defendants trying to use that defense in the past.  Don't hold me on that, but I do think it's been tried. 

I don't necessarily disagree with that either, I think it would be fantastic to interpret the laws to force them to apply only to that which they allegedly applied.  There are times when legislative intent is reviewed and it would a hell of a lot of fun to do that more often. 

8 "That's offtopic?" Ditto. That's the whole friggen answer right there. To everything.

9 Getting closer and closer to cradle-to-grave surveillance. They're going to have all of our medical records centralized, and where we surf, they know which books we check out, which videos we rent, anything we buy on credit cards, our banking transactions, who we call, where we fly, and in come cities they're adding Londonesque camera systems so that they can watch us while we drive and walk around.

Yippee.

10
and in come cities

should read, "and in some cities."

11 Isn't tracking internet browsing "for the children" a parent's job?

12 You'd think so, wouldn't you, Wyatt?  Once again, the feds are assuming that we're so stupid that we can't take care of ourselves and our own.

13 Agreed those ruglations will not help. I doesn't mean there are not good intented but they just don't work. I see all the time in the comparatif assurance habitation industry. We need to judge laws byt their results and not their intentions.