This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 2, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

Congress wants to know where you've been surfing and in pushing for greater data retention by internet providers,

Congress may be preventing providers from effectively protecting your data from hackers.

Members of Congress may understand law, says Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute,

but they don't understand the nuances of evolving technology.

The House Judiciary Committee approved a highly deceptive bit of legislation called the Protecting Children

from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. There's a handful of provisions

here that really have something to do with child pornography, but the centerpiece, something

that's been on the FBI's wish list for years, is a data retention mandate that would require

all internet providers, meaning certainly big ISPs, Comcast, Verizon, but also potentially

any service that enables you to access the Internet and assigns an Internet protocol address to you temporarily for any kind of fee.

There's actually some controversy over exactly who this mandate applies to.

So the chief champion and sponsor of the law, Lamar Smith claims it would not apply

to, for example, hotels and cyber cafes that charge a fee to log on, but by the plain language

of the statute it really seems like it would.

And also apply in principle to what are called anonymizing proxies, again, if they charge

a fee.

These are services that the State Department has actually been very big about

promoting because they're often used by people in repressive regimes to anonymously

circumvent local firewalls that try and block access to subversive content, or at least content that

China or Iran considers subversive.

And the idea behind this legislation is to

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