DreamHost has correctly raised the alarm that this demand could discourage people from exercising their rights to free expression online. Human Rights Watch is concerned not only about this immediate impact on free speech, but also about a risk that if the authorities obtain this information, there may be insufficient protections to prevent them from storing and searching the data for the long-term. If the government takes an expansive view of its powers in that respect – as it has tried to do in at least one previous case – it may even be able to enter the data into databases that could later be used to create profiles of, or map relationships between, people for whom there is no suspicion of wrongdoing.