Really House of Representatives, really?

So for those of you who have not heard, last week the House Judiciary committee passed a bill that will require all Internet Service Providers (ISP's) to log all of their customers internet activity for a year. Named the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, the aim of the bill (so claimed) is to try and catch child pornographers. You can read some details of the bill here or here. While the intention of the bill is of course good, the method that the House decided to go with is just a bit absurd.  As mentioned in one of the previous articles, there are currently around 272 million internet users in the United States.  The current estimated population of child pornographers in the country makes up less than one percent of all these users.  The plan is to log all the internet activity of every internet user in the country, including sensitive information such as credit card and bank account numbers, hand this data over to law enforcement officials, and have them search through it all to find this small population of child pornographers.  Anyone every try finding a needle in a haystack?

This bill seems entirely pointless to me.  Besides the issues of searching through all that data, anyone can set up their computers so that their ISP can't see the internet activity of that individual.  Any one trying to hide anything (say child pornographers), can easily set up these tools.   How many people does the government really plan on catching using this method?  While I am sure they will catch someone, did they really need to log all the activity of every American to catch that one person?  I am sure there are more efficient ways to go about it.

The question must also be asked, what does the government plan on doing with all this data once they have it?  Granted I have not looked at the fine details of the bill yet, but I can almost guarantee that they will not be destroying it.  No one destroys data anymore because they never know when they might need it.  Also, are ISP's going to keep a copy of the data, and what will they be allowed to do with it?  This year has also been a big year for hackers, and this data is going to be a prime target.  I wouldn't be surprised to see all of our internet bills going up to pay for both the extra storage, and the cost to keep the data secure.

I for one, am just outraged by this so called "bill".