WASHINGTON, DC — It’s always about the children. Tracking child pornographers is among the reasons FBI Director Robert Mueller wants to require internet service providers to maintain logs of user activity.The director said so during a hearing before a House of Representatives committee last week.

“Records retention by ISPs would be tremendously helpful in giving us a historic basis to make a case on a number of child pornographers who use the Internet to push their pornography,” Mueller told the committee members. “From the perspective of an investigator, having that backlog of records would be tremendously important if someone comes up on your screen now. If those records are only kept 15 days or 30 days, you may lose the information you may need to bring that person to justice.”

Currently, Mueller is suggesting two years would be an appropriate retention period, and representatives are agreeing with him. Reps. Ric Keller (R-FL), Lamar Smith (R-TX) and John Conyers (D-MI) all indicated they would support a mandatory data retention law at the federal level.

Unfortunately, the scope of any potential legislation remains unclear. Some congresspersons support retaining which IP address is assigned to each customer, while others and Mueller favor a much more detailed record that would include actual online activities like the contents of email and instant messages, search-engine requests and websites visited.

Still others have called for an extension of any potential legislation to domain registries, search engines and social-networking sites.

There even are a few proposals floating around Congress. One proposed by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) would require indefinite retention of user-identification data by any internet service that “enables users to access content” (which, without further definition, would include all websites). Others have been put forth by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Texas’ Smith.

It’s all eerily reminiscent of Alberto Gonzales’ tenure as U.S. Attorney General. Gonzales was a prominent proponent of data-retention laws, remaking famously in September 2006, “This is a national problem that requires federal legislation.”

Under current law (the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act of 1996), ISPs are required to maintain user-identification records only if requested to do so by a “governmental entity,” and then only for 90 days. Most ISPs discard log files well before that, although Comcast has said it maintains IP-user logs for six months.