"The bill also would make

"Smith's bill would loosen those requirements to enable service providers to report threats that are not immediate, and would protect them from lawsuits when they do so. Providers would face penalties if they did not store electronic records, such as customer e-mail, for at least 90 days."

-- USATODAY

On first perusal of this article, I catch two things.

One, providers, even under current laws, are expected to report custommers they believe are planning to injure themselves or others. The only way this could be accomplished is that everything you send through your ISP is not only scanned for buzzwords, but literally read for meaning, outtng the words in context.

privacy... hah.

And since this data is located on the ISPs servers, do they now have the right to sell what they learn about you to other commpanies or individuals. It would sure seem so, considering the resukts of many of the lawsuits that occured after the dotcoms all went bust.

But I pitty the ISPs as well. They are legally required to store copies of all your transmissions for 90 days? The small office I work in easily transmits gigabytes of information by email each month alone.

We're talking terabytes of storage for small ISPs alone. While this is not impossible at the moment, usage increases exponentially each year.