Having just read the law, it seems that what this bill does do is require ISPs to retain information on dynamically assigned IP addresses for 18 months. What the government wants is for ISPs to retain a log of who is connected via what IP address at what times. When you connect to an ISP, most ISPs assign you a temporary IP address through DHCP. When you disconnect from that ISP, your IP address is assigned to someone else.

The FBI might discover, for instance, that someone connected to a computer at IP address 128.200.100.5, on Aug 5, 2010 at 5:35PM and downloaded child pornography. They would then contact the ISP that controls that IP address to find out the name and address of the customer who was assigned that IP address at that time. If the ISP is not keeping logs of DHCP connections, then it has no way of answering the question. The legislation requires the ISP to retain logs of who was connected through what IP address at what time, thus allowing the ISP to answer the question of what customer was connected to what IP address at what time.

This is very different from the EU legislation referred to in the article. The proposed legislation does not require the ISP to retain any information whatsoever about *what* you do while you are on the internet; it only requires the ISP to retain information about *who* is connected to the internet at what time.

The radio exception is likely because it would be infeasible to legally require data logging on wireless routers, both because most wireless routers do not support DHCP logging, and because current wireless network protocols have just a single password to gain access to the router. The protocol does not support userids and individual passwords, so retaining the desired information is impossible because the desired information does not exist.

The legislation may or may not be appropriate, but should at least be debated on the merits of what it actually is, rather than a tightly-spun scare piece.