The Center for Media and Democracy joined a coalition of groups opposing a federal bill that would require internet providers keep large volumes of information on their customers, raising privacy concerns for hundreds of thousands of Americans.

"For more than 40 years it has been a core privacy principle that records should only be created for a specific purpose and deleted as soon as that purpose is complete," the letter states.

However, Section 4 of H.R. 1981 (passed by a House Committee on July 29) would require that many records of internet activity be retained for use in future law enforcement investigations. The bill is titled the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011," but according to the letter, "contrary to the title of the legislation, there is nothing in the bill that would limit the use of these records to child exploitation cases. In fact, the records would involve all internet users everywhere and they would be available to law enforcement for any purpose."

"The bill is mislabeled," said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. "This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes."

While some private online records could be useful for criminal investigations, the majority of the records would include personal information about innocent Americans not suspected of committing a crime. The letter states:

"We live in an age where our devices and the way we use the internet are constantly generating records – what we read, where we go, who our friends are. If those records must always be saved for future use, they become a persistent and pervasive assault on our privacy and an irresistible temptation to law enforcement. That is why best practices in privacy demand the deletion of records as soon as they are no longer necessary – exactly the opposite of the mandate of H. R. 1981."

The letter was directed to Chairman Lamar Smith and Ranking Member John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee. Despite opposition from both left-wing progressives and right-wing libertarians, the bill passed the House Judiciary Committee on a 19-10 bipartisan vote [3], and now goes to the full House.

The following organizations signed the letter:

Advocacy for Principled Action in Government
American Booksellers
Foundation for Free Expression
American Civil Liberties Union
American Library Association
Association of Research Libraries
Bill of Rights Defense committee
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Digital Democracy
Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights
Center for Media and Democracy
Center for National Security Studies Consumer Action
Consumer Federation of America
Consumer Watchdog
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Defending Dissent Foundation
Demand Progress
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Privacy Information
Center Friends of Privacy USA
Liberty Coalition
Muslim Public Affairs Council
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
National Workrights Institute
Patient Privacy Rights
Privacy Activism
Privacy Journal, Robert Ellis Smith, Publisher
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
World Privacy Forum