What is ISP Snooping?
Internet Service Provider (ISP) snooping refers to proposed mandatory requirements in the United States to retain records of everything citizens do online. Archives of each individual’s online activities would be automatically retained for law enforcement in logs that would span up to two years. Only the oldest records would be purged at the end of the retainment period, while new online activities would continuously build the archives. The proposed requirement, known as data retention, is a controversial measure that opens the door to a host of concerns for ISPs and privacy advocates alike. There are several models of data retention or ISP snooping that differ in how much data is actually retained. In the “address” model, basic address information is archived. This would include a date and time stamp of the Internet Protocol (IP) address assigned to each individual, email addresses the individual corresponded with, website addresses visited, chat rooms or newsgroups visited, and phone
