US heading for online data retention law?

In a radical departure from earlier statements, US attorney general Alberto Gonzales has said that requiring ISPs to save records of their customers' online activities is necessary in the fight against terrorism, silicon.com sister site CNET News.com has learned.

Gonzales and FBI director Robert Mueller privately met with representatives of AOL, Comcast, Google, Microsoft and Verizon last week and said that ISP - and perhaps search engines - must retain data for two years to help with anti-terrorism prosecutions, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity on Tuesday.

According to one person familiar with the discussion, Gonzales said: "We want this for terrorism."

Gonzales' earlier position had only emphasised how mandatory data retention would help thwart child exploitation.

In a speech last month at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Gonzales said ISPs must retain records to help investigations of criminals "abusing kids and sending images of the abuse around the world through the internet".

If data retention becomes viewed primarily as an anti-terrorism measure, recent legal and political spats could complicate the Justice Department's efforts to make it standard practice.

Especially after recent reports that AT&T has opened its databases to the National Security Agency, internet and telecommunications executives have become skittish about appearing to be co-operating too closely with the federal government's surveillance efforts.

In addition, the positive publicity that Google received during its legal dispute with the Justice Department over search terms has demonstrated to internet companies the benefits of objecting to government requests on privacy grounds.

One person familiar with Friday's discussions said: "A monumental data trove is a crazy thing from a privacy perspective. It's crazy that the US government is going to retain more data than the Chinese government does."

Comcast said in a statement: "We fully share the attorney general's concern with the need to combat illegal use of the internet for child pornography, terrorism and other illegal activities. We applaud the attorney general's initiative in convening an internal task force on this issue and look forward to continuing to co-operate with him and the FBI."

Details of the Justice Department's proposal remain murky. One possibility is requiring ISPs to record the internet addresses that their customers are temporarily assigned. A more extensive mandate would require them to keep track of the identities of email and instant messaging correspondents and save the logs of internet phone calls.

A Justice Department representative said on Tuesday that the proposal would not require ISPs to retain records of the actual contents of conversations and other internet traffic.

Until Gonzales' public remarks last month, the Bush administration had generally opposed laws requiring data retention, saying it had "serious reservations" about them. But after the European parliament last December approved such a requirement for internet, telephone and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers, top administration officials began talking about it more favourably.

Declan McCullagh writes for CNET News.com