US Policy Would Allow Government Access to Any Email 516
An anonymous reader writes "National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is currently helping to draft a new Cyber-Security Policy that could make the debate over warrantless wiretaps seem like a petty squabble. The new policy would allow the government to access to the content of any email, file transfer, or web search."
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I support this, but I sure as hell don't intend to make it easy for people to invade my privacy when I'm not doing anything illegal.
The Constitution... (Score:4, Insightful)
He's just stretching the constraints (Score:5, Insightful)
Diminishing returns (Score:4, Insightful)
In the end, it's probably a lot more trouble than it's worth to go about things this way, rather than doing the 'traditional' sort of real-life investigation leading to a warrant &c.
They found a way to make encryption mainstream! (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again, it's almost certain that they're already reading all the e-mail. This law is probably just to prevent them from getting sued about it later. Ug
I got an idea.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That should sufficiently prevent this from becoming law!
You can't let the terrorists win (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh hang on we were fighting for freedom and liberty weren't we? So you need to give up all your freedoms to protect your freedom? You'd almost thought that the government was a repressive regime that wanted to subjugate people.
Re:The Constitution... (Score:5, Insightful)
email? Does anybody think that email is private? It is sent in clear text so I would say that it is as private as a postcard.
There is an election coming soon. So for those that really fear this find out where the candidates stand on it.
Then vote.
BTW don't focus so much on the President BTW take a hard look at your congressional reps.
Correct (Score:4, Insightful)
So, that would mean that the societies with the most surveillance were the most secure, right?
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correct (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I got an idea.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Constitution... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Diminishing returns (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say you do something to piss some mucky-muck off and you get on the monitor list. It's only a matter of time before you mention in passing that you copied a DVD or any other heinous crime and bingo! The FBI/Federal marshals/etc are at your door.
Paranoid? I grew up in a communist state. I hate to think I've escaped to one, too....
Re:The Constitution... (Score:5, Insightful)
As I say in every discussion of this nature, "private" in the sense of "can a police officer legally look at this and use it as evidence?" is completely different than in the sense of "could a malicious person who wanted to snoop on what I was saying possibly look at this, the law be damned?"
E-mail is about as physically private as a letter. They are fairly trivial to read but it does require you take take deliberate action to do so. As opposed to a post card which could literally fall out of the postman's hand text-up and be read by accident, other people's emails don't just randomly show up on your screen even if you are an email server sysadmin.
And thanks to recent precedent email is becoming -legally- as private as a letter. Which to repeat, is a different standard, and regardless of the fact that letters are easy to read, they are still considered private. So while a malicious mail man could read your mail whenever they chose, a cop who wanted their evidence to stand up at trial could not without a warrant.
We need to remember both of these. First if you want real privacy even from malicious people, you need to encrypt your email. Second, we still need to keep unencrypted email to be legally private, since otherwise the idea is that if the police -can- read your encrypted emails then they don't count as private and thus no warrant is needed.
There is an election coming soon. So for those that really fear this find out where the candidates stand on it.
Then vote.
BTW don't focus so much on the President BTW take a hard look at your congressional reps.
True that. Sadly enough it's hard enough to get specific answers on what the Presidential candidates' stances are on the subject, much less all the representatives.
Re:The Constitution... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill of Rights Toilet Paper (tm)
It comes with all 10 printed on each sheet. Congress Critters find it to be heavy duty absorbent. Somehow though, that stuff you water the Tree of Liberty with seems to slip through anyway, just a little, but it slips through....
This is bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Amendment IV to the Constitution (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Diminishing returns (Score:4, Insightful)
Other respondents have pointed out the arms race between spam and spam filtering; I had that in mind when I made my response. In essence, as a detection tool, this is going to be more or less useless, outside of the occasional one in a million lucky strike; really, the only way to use it would be to go mining it once you've already detected something nefarious and you want a more solid case--something that could easily be handled by a warrant and seizure of the suspect's computing assets.
Re:The Constitution... (Score:3, Insightful)
just because i don't send all my email with 128bit encryption, it doesn't give you or the government the right to read them.
Re:Diminishing returns (Score:5, Insightful)
But if the government really wants your hide, then they'll have it whether they have any real evidence or not--witness Cardinal Richelieu's words: "Give me four lines written by the most innocent of men, and in them I will find something to hang him." That was just as true then as now.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't work for public discussion lists, or even private ones, unless they're very strictly controlled.
It also doesn't help for p2p traffic, as those are between two essentially anonymous parties, and thus, have no way to prevent a man in the middle attack, even if they DO use encryption (unless the tracker mediates, which, for most implementations that I've seen, it doesn't, even if it's using SSL)
The simple fact of the matter is that encryption is the wrong mechanism to solve this problem. Removing power from your government is the right mechanism, ideally.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
PGP to the Rescue! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:1, Insightful)
Same thing they did in the UK: Pass a law making it illegal not to divulge them, and pass another law that says if you forget or lose the keys, the burden of proof is on you to prove that you forgot or lost the keys.
Or the same thing they tried to do under Clinton I in the US: Require key escrow.
> Not that I support this, but I sure as hell don't intend to make it easy for people to invade my privacy when I'm not doing anything illegal.
When those laws are passed, "using an encryption key without divulging it to the government" will be illegal.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, there are NO sources for this statement. The PDF link gives a 404 and they don't explain what they meant other than using broad terms. It sounds like a lot of FUD without a source to back it up. Does anybody have the PDF? If not then I'd like to see more sources than just an un-signed editorial on Raw Story.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, how exactly is revealing a password any more incriminating than say, allowing police into your home -which is "standard practice"?
-Don't tell us that you killed her -which would be incriminating, just tell us your password -which is something absolutly neutral.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, as long as the constitution holds out, they can ask you your password and you can plead the fifth.
Re:At least they won't be able to mass-scan... (Score:3, Insightful)
No sources (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anybody actually SEEN the draft so that we can comment on it intelligently without relying on "I think the US government is bad, so I'm going to assume they're doing horrible things"? The PDF link in the Rawstory unsigned editorial doesn't work, so it's awfully hard to evaluate their claims. The homepage of Rawstory makes their bias pretty clear, so I'm inclined to not just take their word.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
C'mon. You should know by now that the constitution went belly up back in 1798 [wikipedia.org]. Well, the bill of rights anyway. The parliamentary stuff in the main body is still holding up.
127 hours? (Score:3, Insightful)
Impeach Them Already (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, they're still spinning down how a Filipino Monkey [wikipedia.org] almost gave Bush a pretext for armageddon with Iran last week, continuing to blame Iran.
They still act like they don't even really know for sure who is "the enemy" in Iraq, or when the next Taliban attack [nytimes.com] will show how badly we're losing in Afghanistan to a bunch of medieval hicks hellbent on returning to the Stone Age.
And yes, they're still spying on every email, Web hit and phonecall in the US (hi, Dick!), while hustling to hand telcos amnesty for breaking the law at their request, even though they can't even pay the phonebill so it gets shut down.
These Keystone Konservatives would be hilarious if they weren't the most dangerous people ever in the world.
We have to call our lazy, complacent congressmembers and insist they impeach these criminal retards, instead of just easily running against them this year and inheriting all their catastrophic tyrannical powers.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
> And what is it going to do about my encryption keys?
Same thing they did in the UK: Pass a law making it illegal not to divulge them, and pass another law that says if you forget or lose the keys, the burden of proof is on you to prove that you forgot or lost the keys.
Except in the United States we have this thing called the 5th Amendment which says someone can't be forced to say or do something that will incriminate themselves. As someone up the thread pointed out a judge already ruled for a defendant, United States v. Boucher [wikipedia.org].
FalconRe:crypto (Score:3, Insightful)
Not constitutional, but then, many things aren't.
Not A Chance (Score:2, Insightful)
There's no way this will ever even come near coming true.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't feel comfortable taking such a narrow interpretation of the bill of rights that only things that are literally and directly incriminating are protected.
Sadly, it doesn't matter what you feel comfortable with. It's what a judge feels comfortable with. And lately they seem to be quite comfortable with broad, in some cases overreaching IMHO, interpretations of the bill of rights.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Complete and utter bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
One Good Thing ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody needs to get cracking to devise a cipher that looks just like these spam noise words... something along the lines of a one-time pad [wikipedia.org]
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to try to deny you disagree against government policy, or that you wont vote to keep them in power, or that you don't 100% agree with a corporation that supports the current government and your life and the future of your family will be systemically targeted. Unless you publicly support them and their chosen evangelical religion of power and control, you will become the enemy, and will be accused and judged by the 21st century Internet inquisition and potentially targeted for harsh interogation techniques.
Don't fit their current preferred 'mold' of what they define to be a good, white, evangelical, american and honestly how well will you and your family fare under the 21st century Internet inquisition. Conspire to be free and believe in democracy and justice and you will learn how easily conspiracy laws can be abused.
tyranny (Score:3, Insightful)
What ever happened to the founding father's view that tyrany was ever vigilant and the tyrant would use any means to strip liberty away from its citizens?
Oh yeah, that isnt taught in schools :(
It, freedom from tyranny, not being taught in school may be part of the problem but another part is that those alive now haven't had to fight to preserve it. I think Thomas Jefferson hit it on the head when he suggested there should be a revolution about every 20 years. If you're born and raised under it more than likely you're going to be complacent.
FalconRe:They found a way to make encryption mainstream! (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Amendment IV to the Constitution (Score:4, Insightful)
They'd rather use GenXers as guinea pigs, a much smaller demographic that's not used to having governments and markets abide by their demands (or needs). They are also much more steeped in the individualist mindset such that they're capable of mass-organizing very little outside of the corporate environment.
So yes, you could say the Bill Of Rights is only for old people...
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
It depends on what you write in your posts. If the FBI, CIA NSA, KGB, Gestapo or anyone else wants to read your screed, they may, may they not? After all you're not posting bomb making instructions or other stuff these guys would care about are you?
Forget about privacy in todays modern world. About the only things that may still be private, are the thoughts in your own head. So far only God and you know what those are. But who knows, maybe future technology could even take those inner thoughts and make them available to others.
Time for the rest of the world to stop using GMail (Score:2, Insightful)
Every US citizen needs to read Deterring Democracy (Noam Chomsky) or failing that, try The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein); your government is out of control.
Once upon a time, some people imagined that the internet would be the ultimate platform for free speech. Terrorists will simply get more creative in their communication technology (e.g. steganography on Flickr or other image-sharing web-sites) - it's the regular folk who are losing privacy, not by inches but by miles.