We have the same madness in the EU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...

"The Directive requires Member States to ensure that communications providers must retain, for a period of between 6 months and 2 years, necessary data as specified in the Directive

    * to trace and identify the source of a communication;
    * to trace and identify the destination of a communication;
    * to identify the date, time and duration of a communication;
    * to identify the type of communication;
    * to identify the communication device;
    * to identify the location of mobile communication equipment.

The data is required to be available to competent national authorities in specific cases, "for the purpose of the investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime, as defined by each Member State in its national law"."

A wonderful case of "it's possible so let's do it, screw integrity".

I'm adding

  | mail senator@cornyn.senate.gov

to my syslog.conf

This is so silly.. logs of what? MAC addresses that can trivially be spoofed.

And for anything running NAT, requiring traffic log retention so that law enforcement can correlate accesses?

Good luck getting technically inept coffeeshop owners to do that, most can barely keep the network alive.

Would this make it illegal to have open wifi?

No, but the way that "network communication service" is defined, you have to do the log retention even if it's encrypted and you're the only one who uses it.

What about an automatic IP address on open wifi?