>government requiring companies to keep around communications data You seem strangely narrowly focused on that. Who really cares about that? That is a point of

>government requiring companies to keep around communications data You seem strangely narrowly focused on that. Who really cares about that? That is a point of minor interest. The big issue at hand is this bill is attempting to coin some Orwellian doublespeak in mandating that there exist some secure cryptographic communication channels, with 'backdoors.' That's a logical impossibility. That can't exist, it is either one or the other. >but I don't read anything in there that precludes a service provider that doesn't store a history of users' communications. Precludes from what? But once again the data storage thing is a red herring, who cares, governments are not lacking in collected data. The fact that some of that data is now the form of secret codes bothers some in the government, but rendering the secret code making tools ineffective is not going to make the world a better place.