He knows when you've been bad or good,

So be good for goodness sake!

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. is asking Internet companies including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and AOL to preserve records of customers' Web activity to aid terrorism and child pornography investigations....

The agency(DOJ/FBI) has asked Internet companies to retain records such as lists of e-mails sent and received or information on Web searches. Authorities wouldn't ask the companies to keep the content of e-mails and would use standard legal channels, such as seeking a subpoena, before obtaining information, Roehrkasse said.

The Justice Department has no legal authority to require companies to keep data on their customers and would need to ask Congress for that ability, Roehrkasse said. He said there has been no decision on how long companies would need to store the records.

They want a record that you came by here. When the hearings and investigations come, they can say "What were you doing visiting the websites of known XXXXXXX's and XXXXXXX sympathizers?" (XXXXXXXX to be filled in later with whatever public villian is useful at the time. Communist /Terrorist /Subversive/ Pedophile/ Ecoterrorist/ Narcoterrorist/ etc.)

And the ability to access data on every email sent?

Leaving aside obviously illegal acts like child porn, what if you did a search for VD or unwanted pregnancy, or just two examples from my own image searches that yielded results I wasn't expecting, "gay cowboy" and "Bush black?"

Have you ever accidentally clicked on a link and ended up at Stormfront, or a crazy religious organization, or a UFO site, or any site that might be deemed outside the mainstream? Do you know for a fact that websites you visit don't have child porn or bombmaking information somewhere deep inside? What if I linked to AlQaeda.com for instance under a blind link. Did you click on that?

Well, Al Gonzales and the FBI want the ability to know about it. This is the kind of thing J Edgar Hoover dreamed about as he fell asleep curled up in his flannel nightie.

We're all in Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office now.

(Okay, I know that this article doesn't outright say that websites visited will be tracked, but as it doesn't include chat room logs or even attendance, key to child sex prosecutions, I'm guessing that this isn't the full outline of the request. There has been previous reporting that websites visited might be included in the eventual agreement. And as there is no supporting law at this point, it's really up to the ISP's.)