Internet companies will be forced to spy on you under H.R. 1981
Online commentators are pointing to the Internet backlash against H.R. 1981 as the new anti-SOPA movement. While this bill is strikingly different from the Stop Online Piracy Act, it does have one thing in common: it’s a poorly-considered legislative attempt to regulate the Internet in a way experts in the field know will have serious civil liberties consequences. This bill specifically targets companies that provide commercial Internet access – like your ISP – and would force them to collect and maintain data on all of their customers, even if those customers have never been suspected of committing a crime.
Law enforcement could demand that a social network hand over the IP addresses and logged-in times of an individual using its service. Law enforcement could then combine this information with data from an ISP or mobile carrier to figure who was assigned to each of those IP addresses. For mobile providers, each entry could be combined with data about one’s GPS location. So a law enforcement agent could know when an individual was posting to a social network as well as her location. ISPs will be slightly less exact but still provide a detailed portrait of an individual’s physical location each time she logged in.
This is no nightmare scenario. This is exactly what the U.S. government attempted when it pressured Twitter to hand over Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir’s data as part of the WikiLeaks investigation. And we’ve seen numerous other occasions where law enforcement pressured Internet companies to hand over the IP addresses and times of individuals using their services.
Law enforcement is coming to understand that IP addresses are a powerful key to location data and to tracking people's movements over time. But in order for this data to be most useful to them, they need ISPs and mobile carriers to keep records of who is assigned to which IP addresses, and when.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/how-internet-companies-would-be-forced-spy-you-under-hr-1981