said by Rexter:Awesome, finally some useful information in this thread!
It would be interesting to see an updated document.
I had a chance to read through this manual, and everything in here looks reasonable to me. I have no major issues with what they are doing.
This document PREDATES the proposed SAFETY Act of 2009, and is therefore likely to be far less useful then you think.
I suggest you make the information request under the freedom of information act, if you want to have actual current information.
Specifically the potential for a federal requirement to be able to map a user to every IP address ever used by that user to cover in detail a span of 2 years means that most large (and even small - I know Sonic.net implemented this as well) ISPs went ahead and expanded their record keeping to cover that timespan. So the 180 day thing could easily be a pleasant memory of the past.
Which means if someone wants to map you to a torrent (or to a torrent proxy service, or to any proxy service) they may well be able to do so going back two years. Or any other activity they may wish to explore, so long as they can subpoena the records from your ISP.
There is no law that requires a limit on the span of time the records for your IP assignment are kept. As it's a fairly trivial and fully automated database (one record with two fields - ip address and timestamp, logged whenever the IP changes for an account) for an ISP to gather, if I were to be conservative I'd assume its more likely to be for the life of your account.