Congress: We want our porn labeled and our data retained - Legislation introduced this week would resurrect two bad ideas from last year: mandatory data retention by ISPs, and mandatory labeling of pornographic web sites.

Hmm. Gotta say, both items are too little, too late. ISPs will never be able to store a useful amount of data about their users activities.

At least not enough to accomplish anything. At best it's a loss of privacy with no real return in security or benefit to law enforcement. The amount of  storage capacity needed for a company to store anything useful would be enourmous and without federal money to pay for that stuff, well. Doesn't seem likely to happen.

As for the porn thing, what a waste of time. Sure if you could enforce the requirement in any meaningful way it might be worth the effort but since it would only affect stuff hosted in the United States, how does that help? At least 50% of the porn on the internet would be unaffected by such a law so any effort or money spent on this kind of thing would be automatically 50% wasted. Of course, that's pretty much par for the course with the way government works these days.

A better idea I have heard (at least it's feasible) is to ask content providers to voluntarily move pornographic or offensive content to another TCP port instead of port 80 like regular http traffic. In addition, the US could enforce such a move with fees levvied against those who refused to cooperate. Of course, that might also end up just a boondoggle or afterthought. If the idea had been broached 10 years ago, maybe it could have become entrenched enough to make a difference but now, such a change is highly unlikely.