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DoJ Mulls Tracking Picture Uploads
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Mar 03, 2007 06:26 AM
from the those-game-characters-swore-they'd-been-developed-18-years-ago dept.
from the those-game-characters-swore-they'd-been-developed-18-years-ago dept.
Dominus Suus passed us a link to a C|Net article about a disturbing threat to privacy from the Justice Department. According to the article, a private meeting was held Wednesday between Justice officials and telecom industry representatives. With individuals from companies such as AOL and Comcast looking on, the officials continued overtures to increase data retention by ISPs on American citizens. This week, they were specifically looking to have records kept of photo uploads. In this way, and 'in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate,' an easy trail from A to Z will be available. The article provides a good deal of background on the Bush Administration's history with data retention, with ties to events even older than the Bush presidency. "The Justice Department's request for information about compliance costs echoes a decade-ago debate over wiretapping digital telephones, which led to the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. To reduce opposition by telephone companies, Congress set aside $500 million for reimbursement and the legislation easily cleared both chambers by voice votes. Once Internet providers come up with specific figures, privacy advocates worry, Congress will offer to write a generous check to cover all compliance costs and the process will repeat itself."
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the cash (Score:2)
Re:the cash (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all good.
Parent
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Why us of course.
And the next step is keeping track of what pictures you download. At that point it will be easier for each ISP to just cache the entire internet. Then finally the term "the internets" will be accurate.
Re:the cash (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Cost is no object when its not your money.
The Supremes (Score:2)
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The Bush administration is the most corrupt... (Score:2, Insightful)
I find it scary how little U.S. citizens know about the activities of their government. Part of the reason is that the Bush administration uses the same method of abuse Microsoft uses. Both exploit the fact that it is difficult for people to defend against many, many abuses, each small in themselves. Both, in my opinion, use sophisticated public relatio
Re:The Bush administration is the most corrupt... (Score:5, Informative)
The same corrupt ones that are tacking on pet project spending bills to the "War on Terror" because they know that fucker won't veto his big project?
I find it scary that you say that Bush is the corrupt one and think that by sending the other side a letter they will give a shit.
Parent
Re:The Bush administration is the most corrupt... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Agreed: don't let Bush-hate blind you to history! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Bush administration is the most corrupt... (Score:5, Informative)
Every time accusations were made, the Republicans would "wave the bloody shirt," claiming that the southern Democrats were trying to destroy the government just as they had in the civil war (not unlike the call to national security and invoking the fear of terrorism we see in politics today).
Some things never change, and it seems like politics is just as partisan as it ever was. For an interesting take of the chaos of the Grant years and American society, I suggest reading Gore Vidal's 1876 [wikipedia.org], while historical fiction, it attempts to adhere strictly to the facts of what was going on during that chaotic election year. The parallels to the 2000 Presidential Election are quite interesting as well; the only thing missing are hanging chads.
Parent
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Which is why I'm in Australia.
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The bad thing about this administration is that it has a cooperative legislature and largely indifferent judiciary.
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You should be writing your news media (Score:2)
But what congress can not handle is having light put on them. If you send an e-mail to the congress man, send it to a reporter. In fact, the smart thing is to target several investigative reporters and let them know of any response from the pol. Once a congressman is looking at the media, they tend to get nervous and will push hard
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join the EFF (Score:4, Insightful)
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A hosting issue (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:just the current move in a long game (Score:5, Interesting)
People like to make jokes about Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field". I'd like to point out that a much more powerful version of the same effect permeates Washington D.C.. I was born there, as it happens, and even as a small child I could feel it, a little. I wasn't sure what it was, but something was definitely out-of-kilter even way back then. When we returned home (to another state) I felt an overwhelming sense of normalcy so I know our leaders are driving the country while under the influence of something.
So, our elected officials go to Washington with the best of intentions, perhaps with a sincere desire to make the nation a better place
But by the time you wake up, it is way too late.
Parent
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This is ridiculous and doesn't make any sense. "Girl", "bar" and "morning" are not even words. I believ
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Maybe not to the average Slashdotter, but you just try and explain "rooting" to a politician: you have to speak to people in terms with which they are familiar. Believe me, our Congressional representatives are very familiar with girls, and bars, and mornings after.
Surveillance - not just being mulled about.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against the Department of Justice today, demanding records about secret new court orders that supposedly authorize the government's highly controversial electronic surveillance program that intercepts and analyzes millions of Americans' communications.
When press reports forced the White House to acknowledge the program in December of 2005, the administration claimed that the massive program could be conducted without warrants or judicial authorization of any kind. However, in January of this year, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) had authorized collection of some communications and that the surveillance program would now operate under its approval. EFF's suit comes after the Department of Justice failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records concerning the purported changes in the program (...)"
Seriously.. I echo the former post; join the EFF. Changes are ONLY going to take place through efficient lobbying (but then it also works really well, Halliburton has proved that beyond doubt..)
Privacy (Score:2)
There's still a great deal to be said for the dialup BBS.
Yakima Cowboy spy shop (Score:3, Informative)
What about traffic via the US (Score:2)
Damn. Now I'm going to have to be careful to run traceroute before uploading anything to a server, just in case it goes via the US and some future law change makes uploading pictures of kittens illegal retrospectively. No way do I want my pictures sitting in a US government owned database, especially with their attitude towards applying [wikipedia.org] US law [freesklyarov.org] to foreigners. [theregister.co.uk]
Republican Values (Score:2, Funny)
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They should just CUT the bullshit! (Score:2, Interesting)
Its all about terrorism, child porn, and piracy I am sick to death of them beating this dead horse. Why dont they just get right down to it and ...
1)put cameras in our homes. (They'll just check them when there is a suspicion of a crime)
2)ban all sex out side marriage
3)ban all non secular music.
4)ban all non missionary position sex
5)ban all violence on TV
6)ban all gay people
7)ban the GPL
Use installed camera to enforce all banned.
8)tag us and record where we go with gps ( they'll only che
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US Law (Score:3, Insightful)
IANAL, but this is pretty much my understanding of the situation.
Privacy of electronic communications is protected mainly by the Electronic Communication Act of 1986, which consists of three parts:
Title 1, Wiretap Act: protections communicaiton that have some kind of audio component (paradigm: phone calls)
Title 2, Stored Communications Act: protects electronic communiations while they are in transit or in temporary storage (paradigm: email held in spools, e.g. the old arpanet mail which often sent email through UUCP over 300 baud phone links to reach computers that weren't directly connected)
Title 3, Pen Register Act: prevents placing devices on phone lines to record phone numbers.
Each title of ECPA was written with electronic communication technology as it stood ca 1985, which means that by 1990 it was clearly obsolete. But there is no such thing as an obsolete law, or at least obsolete laws continue to operate in unexpted ways. In this case, the provisions of ECPA have been extended by process of analogy to many situations that weren't even considered in 1985. Many curious questions arise. For example, it would appear that the government cannot rifle through email spool directories without a warrant. But what about when it is delivered to your in box? Many people use their in boxes as filing systems. It would be one thing if it was stored on your computer, but what if it is stored at an ISP?
Or this: the government can't put a pen register on your phone lines -- basically a mechanical device that records the electrical singals on your phone line and makes a paper tape of the numbers you call. Constitutionally they are not prevented from doing so because you are disclosing the phone numbers to a third party -- the phone company. So what about email logs? They are covered by the same constitutional doctrine, but don't appear to be covered by ECPA, which envisions installing a device to reocord transient signals.
Or this: what if there were an image format that included audio commentary? Would this trigger the Wiretap act? Is this why the AG is talking about picture uploads and not movie uploads? Note once again the capriciousness of US law.
As a non-lawyer, I don't really follow all the ins and outs of the developments in information privacy law, because it's not really worth my time. There's no way a nonspecialist can keep track of the twists and turns of case law. The bottom line is this: unlike the EU, we do not have a fundamental, legally protected right to information and communication privacy in the US. The strategy of US lawmakers has been to avoid the recognition of any new rights, but to curb specific abuses when they reach the outrage level.
The result is the capriciousness we have seen. A non-lawyer can't really know what is rights are vis a vis the government, because it depends on a rather haphazard patchwork of statues, viewed through the series of lenses that are judicial analogizing.
The courts have to operate this way, because people who feel outraged by violations of what common sense tells them is a right of privacy keep bringing lawsuits trying to employ a broken down system of statues that implicitly assume those rights, but don't explicitly secure them.
We have reached the point in the US where an ordinary person really can't know what his rights are. Special interests, and officials of a statist bent, have found so many ways to violate the spirit of individual and community liberty embodied in the Constitution, while avoiding technical illegalities. Constitutional law has been stretched to its limits to cover rights clearly implied by the Constitution (e.g. substantive due process), but this process leaves protection of individual and group rights thin and patchy.
I believe is time for a new declaration of human rights in the US along the lines of
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What pisses me off (Score:2)
Is that none of the big political blogs care one bit about this. Sure, they'll write volumes about things like the NSA wiretapping program, but it's so far been largely up to smaller blogs to track this issue. I've been following it [codemonkeyramblings.com] now since the first serious proposal about a year ago. What gives? Why is it so hard to get non-geeks to care about an issue that amounts to one of the biggest police state advances in the last twenty years?
The only problem with this issue is that it will cost them a lot of mon
This is not about the DOJ; It is TIA (Score:2)
One of the problems with TIA(Total information Awareness) was the idea of taking in ALL the data and processing it. What
freefall (Score:5, Insightful)
We live in an authoritarian capito-fascistic state. You can choose to ignore it, you can tell yourself that it doesn't affect you personally (yet); but that won't change the fact. We have government that reinterprets laws and standards to mean what they decide they need to mean to fit their agenda at the mmoment (which usually, in all moments, is CONTROL), it's a system of institutionalized corruption.
Electing someone from the either large party isn't going to help us - I mean, there are a few exceptions in both major parties, but none of the big names really.
I think that the people are going to have to find a way to organize and save our constitution. The system will not save itself because it is compromised. It could be hacked or manipulated and forced to work for us should large groups of people be willing to stand up for their rights - but unfortunately that's not going to happen by voting or by any of the rigged or tilted mechanisms in place.
What people who say things like "I don't mind, I'm not doing anything illegal" fail to realize is that it doesn't matter - because once the entire system of surviellance and control is in place, once you have no privacy or anonimity it is too late - because then the definition of what is legal and what is illegal can be changed.
It's not like they ever give your rights or your expectations of personal liberty back once they have been taken away - even when these things are promised (like sunset provisions) at the time such legislation is proposed.
Aside from that, what if you were at one time in drug rehab - or are a member of a group like AA and all of these records are stored forever and then down the line the whole world can find out all of your private personal stuff.
The slippery slope is no more - we're almost in freefall.
The DOJ only seeks to control the sheep (Score:2)
They don't have time to deal with entities which give a "pushback" when there are so many companies, politicians, and citizens who are ready to roll over, bark, and beg on command. Ter
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Re:How about SSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
YouTube is for people who have a camera but lack talent.
Parent
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My thoughts exactly:P
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Re:How about SSL? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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It's more like a One-Time Pad.
That is the goal, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
A few million, or tens of millions, of motivated citizens are absolutely a threat to rule by the few - which is why anything that allows the populace to realize their predicament and then organize to change it must absolutely be stopped.
There's free as in speech, free as in beer, and free as in range. Americans are free in the latter sense.
Parent