Bipartisan Bill Would Mandate Warrant To Search Emails 103
jfruh writes: Bills were introduced into both the House and Senate yesterday that would amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, requiring a warrant to search Americans' email messages stored on third-party servers even if they're more than 180 days old. The current version of the law was passed in 1986, and was written in an environment where most email users downloaded emails to their computer and erased them after reading them.
Re:Who are you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah it is general politics.
The general population is getting weary of government surveillance.
The President got on record defending such actions.
So the republicans will side with this just to go against the President.
The Democrats need to distant themselves from the incumbent president so the party will have new talking points during the next election, as position themselves as more moderate than their GOP counterparts.
Re:Who are you? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would then need to distance themselves from the president to be seen as more moderate than the insane far-right-wing Republicans?
The Oberton Window [wikipedia.org] has shifted to the right in America. What used to be "insane far-right-wing" is now considered normal, and what used to be centrist is now considered communist. Consider Obamacare: The policy behind it was originally proposed by Republicans, and it is to the right of the health care proposal put forward a generation ago by that pinko Richard Nixon.
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You spelled it wrong. It's spelled Oberon Window [wikipedia.org].
Re:Who are you? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Government is larger than ever before. There are more social programs than ever before.
2) Politicians discuss/argue and vote over gay marriage, something even Democrats would not have touched with a 20 ft pole 20+ years ago. The fact that right wingers cite religious objections isn't anything new, and both parties would've balked at the notion.
3) Media: A really good way to get the pulse of the times. Have you even watched television, or listened to radio? What would've have been vehemently censored before is now commonplace, and no topic is off limits. There are dedicated channels for minorities and alternate lifestyles. Media is much more liberal than ever. (despite protestations from the likes of Dan Quayle)
Obamacare was rejected by the right because they were shut out of much of the process by a majority D 111th congress, the public option was dropped, and because it was rushed through; no one knew exactly what was in it's 10,000+ pages.
Re:Who are you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Claiming that politics have gone in ANY direction is a facetious statement at best and misinformed, to say the least.
This country is not any more leftist than it is any more rightist which it isn't. This country is corporatist, which means that whether anyone anywhere politically is in power the vested interests are going to support corporations which benefit either way.
So whether you have democrat a, republican b, it doesn't really matter unless you fail to understand where the real politics is.
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Underrated. The word is "Oligarchy."
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If you're too young to remember what it was like in the '70s or '80s ...
In the 1970s the government controlled the airlines, the trucking industry, etc., and many people thought that was a good idea that should be expanded to other parts of the economy. Today, nobody seriously believes that.
The fact that right wingers cite religious objections isn't anything new
Actually, it is. What is today called the "religious right" was through most of our history the "religious left". Religious fervor was long associated with progressive politics. The Scopes Monkey trial was prosecuted by none other than William Jennings Bryan, the original SJW.
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First of all, their are two major difference between the parties, that are affecting your thoughts:
1) Liberals call out and vilify their extremists. The Conservatives ELECT them. This is a major difference. There is no liberal equivalent in national politics of Palin, Cruz, Bachmann, or Christine O'donnell.
2) The Democrat party accepts moderates and centrists, while the Republicans kick them out.
This gives the false impression that the country has shifted lef
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Finally, the far right has consistently and falsely argued that the media is against them. That is bull and always has been. The honest truth is the media is no different today than it has ever been - it tries to be impartial but fails .
Reading about the press's role in the rise of fascism in 1930's Europe is truly frightening. Looking at American newspapers from that era is equally jarring. Some editors were obviously so afraid of Communism (which they conflated with the labor movement) that they were willing to openly support Mussolini and Franco. Anybody who knows anything about the history of the press should scoff (or be worried) anytime Republicans and Fox News talks about the Liberal Media.
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You are incorrect and missing sever facts. ...
The government is NOT larger than ever before - when you adjust for GDP. Inflation is the wrong measure. GDP is the right one. The bigger the economy, the more we need to spend. ...
You are wrong on several points, the easiest one to point out is spending as a percentage of GDP. We are above WWI, close to the peak of WWII. It does go back down for brief periods, but the trend is clearly.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html
It shows government spending almost 40% of GDP. What percentage would you like? 60% 80%?? Somehow we grew from nothing to a world power on 20%.
Also, extreme or not depends on your point of view. Some might say electing KKK members to th
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Not left. Not right. CORPORATE. (Score:2)
The Democrats shifted corporate.
To your points:
o Who benefits when unions are taken down? Corporations.
o NAFTA -- free trade -- brings access to tons of cheap foreign labor. Who benefits? Corporations.
And so on. At this point in time, if it is anything but a relatively pure social issue, you can almost always look into it, follow the money, and end up with a "this benefits the corporations" understanding of the outcome or the push for almost anything you look at within the boundaries of Washington or any st
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1) Liberals call out and vilify their extremists. The Conservatives ELECT them. This is a major difference. There is no liberal equivalent in national politics of Palin, Cruz, Bachmann, or Christine O'donnell.
So first off you saying Ted Cruz is more extreme then Liz Warren? Why is Ted Cruz extreme? Because he want's to control the size of the federal government using the tools made available by the constitution (congress is not intended to rubber stamp the presidents spending wishes). And comparing Cruz to a Senator who says that a business owner did not build their business, it was government that did it.
Michelle Bachmann - no longer in congress. Why? Because she would have been primaried due to being wack
Re:Who are you? (Score:5, Insightful)
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More news at 11.
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I merely made the observation that things are not as conservative as they once were. It's not the '50s anymore.
RomneyCare (Score:5, Funny)
Consider Obamacare: The policy behind it was originally proposed by Republicans
I'm grateful that Obama and Congress got together and passed RomneyCare.
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The wingnuts will not be acting like the wingnuts they are until after the election.
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no. I expect that right before the bill is voted on, 'not' will be inserted at a few strategic spots in the bill, completely reversing the sense of the bill, so that even janitors working at the local mayor's office will get unfettered access to your email.
Re:Who are you? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Who are you? (Score:5, Funny)
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amendment 1: Evolution is real
amendment 2: Creationism is a hoax
bill fails
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We've secretly replaced you regular Democratic congress with a Republican one. Lets see what happens...
Good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
America calls itself the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
We need to make sure laws are in place to protect our freedom, even if it does mean reduced security. We as a culture should be brave enough to deal with the fact we may have less than perfect protection as so we can have our liberty.
We have law enforcement groups doing their job, and asking for more powers, because they want to do their job to the best of their abilities. However we as a culture will need to go. We know this could cost lives, but our freedom is more important, than the risks.
Re:Good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Supreme Court has migrated base rights into new areas of technology in the past:
- Freedom of the press doesn't mean literally a printing press anymore, control of which was a back door way of controlling speech even if there was no direct censorship.
- The SC ruled infrared scanners that passively looked through walls required a warrant, as the founding fathers, and Americans' expectations, were such that an area was secure from warrantless examination.
As Americans move more of their life into the online virtual world, they carry with them the same expectation of privacy from warrantless search. The Supreme Court should overturn the outdated loophole that is from the telephone days, that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in data held by 3rd parties.
Well, no, everybody has that expectation. The King of England would have abused it, and warrant requirements would have been included in the Constitution.
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Actually, the primary consideration is less "privacy" and more "the public can't get access to the equipment". As in you're free to use binoculars and telescopes to look in through the windows because they're something the public can get their hands on and anything seen through it is fair game.
You're not
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what!?! The right to privacy is clearly enshrined in the constitution. Nothing in the 10th applies.
Look at it this way, 50 years ago, if you left your mail at my house when I moved out, after some time, it was clearly abandoned. That's how the law is written and it made sense then. The change is now that email stays on a server, it's not abandoned. This is a good law, the old one was, for it's time, a good law.
Re:Good to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
Emails are the post card of the digital age.
This proposed bill is designed to acknowledge that, sure, mail carriers *can* just read your mail while delivering it, it is after all right there next to the address, but we are going to be telling them that that is really, really bad, and if they do it that we won't like them one bit. The other piece here is that there is mail that has already been delivered, that resides on non-government servers. This proposed bill says that you can no longer have free reign to that data (they didn't, really as they needed to request it from companies who typically said "piss off", but for the sake of argument, let's say that they did), this bill says "get a warrant before asking".
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you know why emails are sent plaintext? Because since the early days of the internet, certain providers have offered free email in exchange for getting access to the content and scanning it for advertising purposes. You could attempt to create a standard that only decodes emails at the user end, but goog and yahoops would throw a fit and it wouldn't go anywhere.
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Wha??? Email is plaintext because it's an old protocol and security was an afterthought with most of the original protocols. Email predates the commercialization of the internet by decades.
Email in exchange for being spied on was a Google innovation in the mid-2000's. If that's what you consider the "early days of the internet", I guess...
The first personal email services were offered for pay by ISPs or gratis as Hotmail/Rocketmail/etc. They may have been spied on, but it wasn't part of the agreement and it
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true, but considering how goog has been pushing the internet forward to modern secure standards in many areas, I assure you they will never lift a finger to make secure email.
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Are you a kid or something?
There was email before gmail.
We had email back when it was only used across accedemic institutions.
Email was not encrypted for a lot of reasons.
1. Packet sniffing wasn't invented.
2. Ease of coding
3. No standardization on encryption
4. Most computers would take too much CPU to encrypt
5. Nothing else was encrypted and you are lucky if you got all your data
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Expectation of privacy (Score:3)
Expectation of privacy has nothing to do with encryption. Encryption is simply hardening a boundary.
If I put a letter in an envelope, you getting to it is utterly trivial -- the use of one fingernail. But that doesn't in any way erode my expectation of privacy. If, on the other hand, I encrypt the letter, all I've done is harden the boundary -- my expectation is still the same: I don't think you have a right to access that letter.
If I close the front door to my house, but I don't lock it, I'm NOT inviting y
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America calls itself the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
Let's be honest: that is nothing but PR. The freedom of U.S. residents has been restricted severely, it has a flawed democracy and its judicial system is ludicrous. As for braveness, much of this policy has been based on nothing but fear.
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"it has a flawed democracy and its judicial system is ludicrous" -- It may appear to have a "flawed democracy" because it is a republic and not a democracy; its judicial system, even if not perfect, is one of the most stable in the history of the world with strict protections against judicial anarchy. Not quite sure what more You'd want.
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And this again.
Playing devil's advocate.... (Score:3)
Far better, for privacy, if technological solutions (email encryption) protected the privacy of email.
If it's just protected with bills like this, it does nothing to stop programs like the DoD/NSA's "collect everything" projects; and from there it's only a small step for one agency to assist parallel reconstruction to get around the warrant.
Better for everyone's privacy if the bill
Hardening is not equal to privacy (Score:2)
You know what follows this line of reasoning?
a) "He looked into my home with FLIR!"
b) Well, you should have insulated your walls with IR-opaque materials. No expectation of privacy, brah.
a) He charged stuff to my credit card!
b) Well, he read the numbers they require right off the card. No expectation of privacy, brah.
a)
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But our leader promised us that we didn't need to make such a tradeoff! https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I think platitudes like these are part of the problem, because politicians just cycle through them as they fail to deliver specific results on any one of them: after "Land of the Free", we get "The American Dream" or "Fairness" or "The Shini
foreign servers? (Score:1)
What about servers in other countries, such as countries that may actually care a tiny bit about privacy?
It only applies to "Americans' mail" (Score:1)
So for 95% of the world, there is no improvement in any way and for the remaining 5%, U.S. agencies have to ask foreign agencies to snoop on their behalf, or find some way in which they can claim this law does not apply or cannot be upheld.
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You mean like it was before 9/11.
Amendment IV has it covered (Score:1)
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . "
We already have a law covering this.
Plain text is irrelevant. Mail is plain as well. (Score:2)
Nope. email is not similar to a postcard. email is considerably more similar to mail in an envelope. You have to take some very specific, targeted actions to read my email. In transit, you have to access, copy or intercept, and reassemble the packets. Once on the server, you need to look in an area reserved for my effects for information that was not directed to you, you must open the file, and then read it. It's definitely in an envelope. Just as your banking information is in an envelope, a ladies panties
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"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . "
We already have a law covering this.
The 4th Amendment alone does not cover this issue fully, since it leaves open the possibility that the government or the legal profession gets to decide what is reasonable.
The addition of the 9th and 10th Amendments (unspecified rights retained by and reserved to the people) is needed to close the loophole. This ensures that "reasonable" must also match what the people consider reasonable, not merely what members of two special interest groups consider reasonable.
This, of course, invalidates many of the se
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Good ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the bill was idiotic ... wow, it's been on a server, you must have abandoned it and therefor we don't need a warrant.
Right, because it should be totally OK for police to rifle through your stuff without legal authorization.
It's about time they started enforcing the 4th amendment ... maybe we're finally starting to see some common sense and sanity applied to this stuff.
Now if they can tackle the institutionally authorized perjury which is "parallel construction", we'll be getting somewhere.
It's time to remind law enforcement that they are not, in fact, above the law.
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What makes you think either will happen. This is the post 9-11 world! They will call in every agency they can think of including the forest service and then blow the briefcase up in a big spectacle.
Once they find out it was harmless they will seek to prosecute the owner for whatever they can get to stick for the crime of making them look like raving lunatics.
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Actually you often had a email account and logged in and read it using a command line interface and yes email was left in the mail box.
After that came POP and IMAP, both of which supported leaving email on the server. The main reason for down loading was the ridiculously small amounts of email storage space offered.
The entire premise that email over a certain number of days is abandoned was always false.
Bipartisan bill to legitimize warrentless wiretaps (Score:2)
... except in the case of email. By passing this law, aren't they implying that email (and therefore all other electronic communications) aren't already covered by the 4th Amendment?
How about passing a bill that gives mandatory minimum sentences for violating the Constitution?
posting to remove a bad moderation (Score:2)
Use to? (Score:5, Interesting)
The current version of the law was passed in 1986, and was written in an environment where most email users downloaded emails to their computer and erased them after reading them.
I *still* POP my mail down to my home PC from my ISP and Gmail, though I still have to periodically log into Gmail and purge "deleted" messages (what part of Delete don't you understand Google?) And, no, I don't read personal email elsewhere. And, no, I don't have a smartphone. Not a Luddite, just don't need to be *that* connected.
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That's a fully reasonable way to do things. But understand you are taking a much greater role of data ownership than is typical these days- mostly because email volume has increased, but also because the topics in emails have become a lot more varied since back in the day. In the 80s and early 90s a romantic email would be the punchline to a joke, as would an email making plans with all your friends. Email is the workhorse- if you think sending out a planning email is ludicrous, it's because you do all
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it's because you do all that on a bookface or a tweetspace or an imgster
Don't you mean on my Friend Agenda page?
I always thought that sounded too much like Gender Bender page, not that there's anything wrong with that, it just made me laugh when I heard it, sometimes at inappropriate times in an episode.
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The compromise for me (which works quite well) is I configure Thunderbird to leave the last 2 weeks of email on the server. You can also configure Filters to remove emails from the server after filing them...
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I *still* POP my mail down to my home PC from my ISP and Gmail, though I still have to periodically log into Gmail and purge "deleted" messages (what part of Delete don't you understand Google?).
Yeah, me too. But he's right in that there's been a movement away from POP to IMAP and especially to webmail. Judging from most people I know, I'd say most people access email via a webpage, and that their saved mail resides on the provider's server.
But even if, as you say, you download and delete from the server, there seems to be no guarantee it's gone from the server.
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I generally suggest that people just copy their email down so there will be a backup left on the server for when lookout eats itself or their PC dies.
Is there a downside to this bill? (Score:3)
It's fashionable to shit on politicians no matter what they do, but I very much tire of "HarUMPH this does not go far ENOUGH!!!".
But here's my question- is this bill just like, a great thing that we should have, or is there some hidden aspect to it (ex: if it had language that allowed for warrants to be issued automatically)?
Because if it doesn't, super party and yay. If it does, presumably we'll hear about it soon enough.
This is a good start (Score:4, Insightful)
Better would be one that required the same for searching headers and other meta-data for all live and store-and-forward communication, including snail-mail, and one which would ban retention of this information by carriers after it is no longer needed for delivery- or billing-, or legitimate tracking purposes.
In other words, stop the US Post Office from keeping the to/from information from mailed items for more than a few weeks after the item was delivered (you need to keep it a few weeks in case a customer claims it was never delivered). Similar, force phone companies to delete calling data after the bill has been paid and any bill-dispute time-period has elapsed UNLESS the customer has signed up to have the carrier keep such records.
Is this gonna happen soon? Of course not - it may never happen as long as our country exists in its current form (i.e. all bets are off if there is ever a revolution - which I am *NOT* advocating) - but I still want it.
Won't Pass if it's Constitutional (Score:3)
No one in Washington gives a damn about the US Constitution anymore. It won't pass.
Fantastic! A warrant is required (Score:5, Insightful)
From a secret court.
Under authority of secret laws.
Or alternately secret interpretations of secret laws.
The secret warrant has a secrecy requirement to gag anyone from telling of the warrant's existence.
Breaching the secrecy can result in secret arrests in the middle of the night by secret agents of agencies that must remain secret.
Any secret trials may use secret evidence and secret testimony that the defense is not allowed to see or refute.
But at least a warrant will be required. Whew! I feel safer already.
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180 days (Score:2)
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Good question. Let's say that they suspect you of money laundering, but have no admissible proof. If they can examine your old emails, they may find evidence that you were laundering money back then and use that to get a warrant to read your current emails. In effect, this is pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and making an end-run around the intent of the requirement for a warrant. This law would block that loophole and
December 2012 called, they want their bill back (Score:1)
Let's hope things work out better than they did in a couple of years ago [allgov.com].
Bipartisan Bill? (Score:1)
I'd vote for him, especially if he is mandating a warrant! (for ANY-damn-thing these days!)