While Congress and the White House are engaged in a very public battle about the debt ceiling, a House panel has quietly approved a bill that would give the government greater access to your online activities. In a 19-10 vote, a House committee approved a bill requiring Internet service providers to keep logs of their customers’ use for one year, should law enforcement require the data.

The bill should be of great concern to consumers because it further requires ISPs to provide such information as credit card and bank account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and temporarily assigned IP addresses, says CNET’s Declan McCullagh. It also opens the door for other parties (such as litigators) to access the information.

And to make sure that opponents have a difficult time, proponents have dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. Citizens (and their representatives) who oppose the bill have two choices: vote against their own privacy interests or against protecting children from predators. Rep. John Conyers (D) Michigan has noted that the bill is “mislabeled” and provides a “database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”

Read more at CNET ^[1].