The FBI is putting the pressure on ISPs to keep logs of what user do online, and then to keep these records for at least two years. FBI Director Robert Mueller is calling for the retention of user “origin and destination information.”
CNET has a great article up tracing out the history of the FBI’s call for data logs. From the article :
As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.
One has to wonder how all of that information is going to be useful. If you’re trying to parse everything that an ISP’s customer has done over the course of two years, you’re going to end up in the territory of Excel spreadsheets that bring even the mightiest CPUs to a crawl.