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US Wants Courts to OK Warrantless Email Snooping
Journal written by Erris (531066) and posted by
Zonk
on Mon Nov 05, 2007 07:11 AM
from the hope-they-enjoyed-my-firefly-related-diatribes dept.
from the hope-they-enjoyed-my-firefly-related-diatribes dept.
Erris writes "The Register is reporting that the US government is seeking unprecedented access to private communications between citizens. 'On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government's request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case centering on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. ... the position that the United States government is taking if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody's email at any time without a warrant. The most distressing argument the government makes in the Warshak case is that the government need not follow the Fourth Amendment in reading emails sent by or through most commercial ISPs. The terms of service (TOS) of many ISPs permit those ISPs to monitor user activities to prevent fraud, enforce the TOS, or protect the ISP or others, or to comply with legal process. If you use an ISP and the ISP may monitor what you do, then you have waived any and all constitutional privacy rights in any communications or other use of the ISP.'"
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Court Refuses To Rule On ECPA Warrantless E-mail Searches 122 comments
utkalum writes "After Steven Warshak's indictment and conviction on charges of mail and wire fraud, money laundering and other federal charges, he learned that key evidence in the case was obtained by the government under a 1986 law permitting no-warrant searches of email communications stored for longer than 180 days. He also learned that, despite the Electronic Communication Privacy Act's requirement that such searches be disclosed to the suspect no more than 90 days after they were commenced, the Government simply couldn't be bothered to comply. Now, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has refused (9-5) to hear Warshak's constitutional challenge to the Act (PDF), claiming that the question raised is 'not yet ripe' for adjudication.
It's worth noting that the court also vacated an earlier injunction against using that act to read the e-mail of other people in Warshak's district. Read on for an excerpt from the ruling.
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"Land of the Free" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Land of the Free" (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:"Land of the Free" (Score:5, Insightful)
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No Dissent. Evil Past and Worse Future. (Score:5, Insightful)
They can spy on Democrats, their own people and anyone's and that's why this is more important than firefly diatribes. Without privacy in communications anyone who would bother to stand up for your rights can be identified and punished. Targeting can start in school, before the victim understands the issues or can defend themselves. Anyone who would encourage or aid the dissenter can also be punished. What the current administration is asking for is a tool more complete than Orwell was able to imagine in a paper world.
Imagine, for example, that Martin Luther King Jr. [wikipedia.org] had been identified when he was a Morehouse College, instead of 1961. Do you think he would have been able to withstand such early and sustained attention as he suffered later [wikipedia.org]? As late as the 1980's some asshole decided to prove that King did not deserve his PhD [wikipedia.org]. If a smear campaign had been launched while King was at Morehouse, he would never have made it in to Boston or Crozer. Would it have been possible to recognize a pattern or would society have simply been robbed of a charismatic champion?
It's cases like King's that created the outrage that outlawed domestic spying. We should remember those foul deeds and start the pendulum swinging back towards privacy. What we find today may be worse than what we know about King because technology has made things so much easier to identify, smear and harass.
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Re:"Land of the Free" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep... 20 mln citizens have already gone to labor camps and hundreds of thousands executed [wikipedia.org], while deliberately-induced starvation [wikipedia.org] is killing millions more on conquered lands. No private property can legally exist — all enterprises belong to the State (of Workers and Peasants). It is illegal for peasants to leave their village without the headmaster's Ok (he is the one issuing them passports), and for all others to leave the country. Those suspected of subversion are tried by secret courts — either for the actual subversion, or (in the later stages of the Cold War) for "drug dealing", "gun possession", or homosexuality [wikipedia.org]. It is illegal to own "xerox" machines and other "publishing" equipment.
Hot water is a luxury available in cities, and even the running cold water (where available) could be out for days and weeks at a time. Wait for for an apartment is counted in years (and decades), as is the wait for telephone connection. Cars are small, unreliable, polluting, expensive, but you can't get them anyway. Same is true of electronics and most other manufactured things.
Yes. America is not that different at all...
Patently false — the government is seeking access to one particular method of communication — unencrypted e-mails. Whether they get it or not, you are a fool, if you expected privacy of that to begin with...
Except the Register, right? Phew...
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Re:"Land of the Free" (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you can't reasonably expect any privacy in email unless you encrypt its contents.
On privacy, while it is possible to read an unencrypted e-mail, that is not the same as an invitation to do so. It is possible to read my documents in my locked file cabinet, it just requires access and a pull hammer. Does that mean that those can be reviewed by the government? My phone line can be tapped by pretty much anyone, but does that mean it is okay for everyone to do so?
I don't disagree, I think that encryption is a fine thing, and should be used more often. However, I do not believe that my right to privacy exists regardless of the technological possibilities to interfere with it.
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Postcard/envelope analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Postcard/envelope analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, the snagging point is the definition of "expectation of privacy" -- but the situation is really quite simple: The average user simply expects privacy, but the government is trying to force them to abandon that expectation, so they can then go and install ubiquitous e-mail surveillance without violating the letter of the US Constitution. The government is trying to win by arguing semantics, so what I find hardest to believe is that anyone is taking all this blatant skullduggery seriously. I've seen better weaseling from schoolkids trying to avoid homework assignments.
E-mail is electronic, so the message is NOT viewable in transit without making an effort to intercept and decode it, even if the encoding is just ASCII. It's not like mailing a postcard, it's like sending an electrically encoded text message over a packet-switched data network where the only expected viewing point is at the intended recipient's terminal; this is how the e-mail protocol was designed to work. Sure, a malicious party can read it because it's not encrypted, but someone can easily slice open a postal mail envelope and read the contents of that, too.
The bottom line is, since a non-trivial effort has to be made to read the contents, and since the service has always been presented as a "sealed letter", the average user is not unreasonable in expecting privacy.
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You Don't Understand At All. (Score:5, Insightful)
The general populous need to be more aware that plain email is more like a postcard than a message in a sealed envelope though.
"Reasonable expectation of privacy" arguments mask the true cost of tyranny and the public should object to all forms of domestic spying. The right emails do not just fall from the sky onto FBI agent desks so that criminals can be prosecuted. It costs money to read and sort email. It's outrageous to waste tax money on things like that because criminals know how to hide and the machinery will be abused for political purposes [slashdot.org]. One way to protect the public from that kind of waste and abuse is to demand government obtain search warrents for email snooping. This is what the fourth amendment is all about.
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Re:Postcard/envelope analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Right.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
The far more impacting (and interesting) legal question is how the courts are going to view the 4th amendment (and others) in light of the way communications are stored for eternity on the internet. A traditional approach seems unwise, since the way ISPs word their terms of service make it so your data practically falls under the "open fields" doctrine for purposes of search and seizure. On the other end of the spectrum, I don't want police investigations entirely shut down just because we want heightened protections for data that we keep in essentially insecure methods.
If you are that worried about privacy, use PGP or GPG.
Re:What privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
BZZZT. Once again this fallacy rears its head.
The U.S. Constitution is NOT a positive enumeration of citizens' rights. You have a right to do everything except what is specifically forbidden (by laws that we consent to live under). In addition, the Constitution isn't even about you, Mr. Citizen. The Constitution is about what We the People will permit government to do and not do. In other words, we (the people) already have all the rights in the universe*. A few of those we will consent to give for the purpose of living more-or-less harmoniously, and a few of those we will permit to the government. All else we reserve for ourselves and for the individual States in which we consent to live.
* So yes, I do have a Constitutional right to broadband Internet access.
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oblig xkcd (Score:5, Funny)
Let them read... my headers. (Score:5, Informative)
No problem... let them snoop. Now I'll just be twiddling the "Encrypt and sign all outgoing email" box on my MUA, and finally start using GPG [gnupg.org] full-time for all of my incoming and outgoing email, instead of with just my friends and close colleagues.
There are plugins for Evolution [lwn.net], pine [dma.org], mutt [codesorcery.net], Thunderbird [mozdev.org] and just about every other Mail User Agent you can find out there.
Another great benefit, is that I can automatically block/quarantine/delete any and all email that does not contain a gpg-signed component (i.e. 99.999% of all email out there, mostly spam). dspam [nuclearelephant.com] does an amazing job, but being able to just reject it at the MTA level would be great.
And for those that wish to converse with me, please make sure to use my GPG key [veridis.com] to do so (also available here [pilot-link.org] with detailed instructions).
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where's the news on this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Think about it" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Think about it" is usually the final sentence after a list of "proofs" that present the point of the one arguing. "Obviously" is used whenever he does not have any facts to support his theory. No facts needed, it's "obvious" and if you don't agree, you can't even see the obvious, dumbass!
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Re:"Think about it" (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:"Think about it" (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and for the "it's the Register, pooh pooh" crowd, the original FA was frist psoted on Security Focus [securityfocus.com].
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Re:"Think about it" (Score:5, Insightful)
Considerably more germane to how the US is supposed to work than a religious quote, the constitution has this to say:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Notice how a warrant has to be issued describing the "place" to be searched. The beginning of the amendment specifies "houses", but the rest is more general - the implication is that your shed, your place of business, someone else's coffee kiosk or bench or "mailbox of letters" or "container of packets", all are protected against unreasonable search. What is unreasonable in this context? It's right there, just read it: "right of the people to be secure" - that's unreasonable to violate. If you're not secure, you've been violated unless (a) they have probable cause and (b) they have a warrant and that warrant is supported by oath or affirmation.
With regard to communication modalities, at the time, what they had for remote communications was basically paper. Please note the explicit constitutional reference to the security of papers. You could write something down and send it elsewhere. This is where the idea that your mail should be secure comes from. Well, today, we have other mechanisms. Do you think that in ANY rational world, if the authors of the first amendment knew that you could send messages over wires or through the air, that they would have said, "Oh, well, in that case, you have no right to be secure? You can't base such an argument on how "easy" it is to read such communications, because there's nothing as easy to read as the mail is.
Those authors weren't trying to enumerate the "only" places you were to be secure, they were trying to say you should be secure PERIOD unless... oath, probable cause, warrant. I read the "persons, houses, papers and effects" as a general set of guidelines that is broadly inclusive; that reading is particularly supported by "effects", because that word is about as non-explicit as you can get in the language of the day.
Privacy is the social boundary that the citizens agree shall not be crossed. Closed doors shall be knocked upon; locked or not. Skirts shall not be looked up, short or long. Envelopes shall not be opened, unless addressed to you. Diaries shall not be read except by explicit permission from the author. These things are all important cornerstones of how society works. Not a one of them carries the addendum "unless it is easy" because it is obvious to each and every one of us that the existence of such boundaries is what makes life as an individual reasonable.
To the extent that the government argues that "because it can", it should be allowed to, we are faced with an intrusion that is both antisocial and constitutionally wrongheaded, as well as, I would argue, constitutionally anticipated and explicitly forbidden.
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Re:"Think about it" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes, "think about it" is an invitation to test your brain and see if it's broken before they write you off as an idiot who really is.
Obviously.
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Outrageous conclusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Staged faked news conferences and failed to tell the real reporters
2) Cant decide whether waterboarding is torture
These people will do anything they are allowed to until they are told no and
sometimes even after they are told no.
There is a way around this, if a court says the ISP agreement is what creates
or does not create a reasonable expectation of privacy then the day after
the court rules as such then I will tell my ISP either they change their ISP
agreement to say that my emails are private and will only be disclosed upon a valid
court order or I will find a new ISP that will do so.
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alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only as long as it remains legal to encrypt your mail.
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Re:Foreign emails too? (Score:5, Insightful)
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