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Net Privacy -- Cable vs. Telecom Service
doranb writes: "Carl Kaplan has a good article this week in his CyberLaw Journal. It seems U.S. users who access the Internet via cable modems may enjoy greater privacy protections. About halfway through the article he says: 'That's because the laws governing the cable television industry, the Cable Act of 1984 and the related sections of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 have privacy protections for cable subscribers that make the telephone wiretap laws seem positively pallid. Take a case where an FBI. agent wants to intercept real-time e-mail generated by a cable-modem user. Under section 551(h) of the Cable Act, the government has to secure a court order based on "clear and convincing evidence" that the target may be involved in a crime. That's a higher standard that the "probable cause"" required for a phone tap.' The question becomes: Should the U.S. 'dumb down' these protections to be equivalent to telecom, or should they beef up telecom's protections to be equal to the cable industry?"
Maybe I'm almost on my own but doesn't anyone else think that expecting laws and legislation to protect people's privacy is a bit shallow? I don't like people reading my email, etc, but at the same time I think it's silly to expect that simply asking people not to will stop it from happening.
It's not even security by obscurity, it's obscurity by politeness. Even if government agencies can't monitor traffic, what about the rights of ISP's to monitor traffic passing through their system? Since the Internet is an open system, there's also not much guarantee that an ISP won't on-sell information to the government, anyway.
This is why I think Carnivore and various other privacy issues shouldn't be any more than an issue between an ISP and the government. There can be legislation to prevent governments from monitoring communications, but there's no clean way to enforce it. There's also no clean way to stop non-governement entities from intercepting information.
I think the more fundamental issue is government controls on the use and distribution of things like cryptography. Restrictions on this are a major reason why the privacy infrastructure of the net is hopeless right now, which is the reason why people are so concerned about the government monitoring their net-communications.
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The issue that stands out the most to me here is the part about notifying a suspect before you tap them. I mean, really, as much as all you privacy fanatics out there want to download your pr0n in safety, do you honestly even want to know that letters like this are going out to your neighbors?
F.B.I., New York Branch
August 5, 2000
Mr. Galeewakitz(remember the beer commercial?),
It has come to our attention that you may be planning on committing a crime in the near future. Furthermore, our sources inform us that you may reveal some information leading to your conviction between the days of November 21, 2000 and November 25, 2000. Please be advised that under the Cable Communications Act of 1984, we are required to give notice of our intention to monitor your electronic communications via Cable Modem on these dates. Should you object to these plans, please contest the issue at your nearest Court of Law on or before October 1, 2000.
Courteously Yours,
Agent Smith,
F.B.I.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
Uhh, you could just set up a physical firewall with an old 486 box that would block incoming and outgoing traffic other than what you specify.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I'm sick of seeing laws written prior to the technological explosion made to apply to todays computer systems. Someone needs to step up and start making some new laws specific to the field. E-mail has nothing whatsoever to do with the medium by which it is transfered. In the end, they all end up going by fiber anyway. Where are the laws dealing with taping fiber lines? The telephone and television have nothing to do with dial-up and cable modems. The only similarity lies in the medium used to transer information.
This problem has frequently plaqued the judicial system lately. Intellectual property, for one, is ill-defined. Microsoft can be ordered to release their source code. That's like forcing Coca-Cola to open the vault and bring the secret formula to Pepsi's door. Yet at the same time, source code for an open-source DVD player can't be distrited because it discloses an encryption method. A merger between two telephone providers is prevented, but a merger between AOL and Time Warner isn't. Napster can be ordered to shut down until it's decided if it's within the law. That's prior retraint. It's also saying they are guilty until proven innocent.
As an analogy, I use the Second Ammendment. (I'm not taking a stance on gun control, just using an example of laws taken out of context.) People argue that they have the right to own a gun becuase of the Second Ammendment. Where are the Redcoats and the revolutions in the country-side? The Second Ammendment starts by stating that it exists becuase a millia is necessary....
Too many of our existing laws have been bent out of shape, often in contradictory manners as it suits the court. And it almost always happens at the expense of technology. The solution is not to choose which of the old laws to apply. That leaves too much up for argument. The solution is to make totally new laws specifically designed for the technological age in which we live.
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Clearly, wiretaps of any sort (phone, internet, etc) are a useful tool in the right hands. The trouble is, most of the decisions fall into the same category as Montana's old "Reasonable and Prudent" speed limits -- everyone has a different opinion of what that means.
While I don't want an overly sympathetic judge to grant warrants for anything imaginable, I damn sure don't want a privacy zealot hampering a terrorist investigation!
Since we can no longer trust a single judge to "do the right thing", perhaps we need to require that granting warrants (or sentences, for that matter) be decided by a panel of at least 3 judges -- in the hope that "cooler heads" will prevail.
I, for one, would sure like to see some semblance of common sense return to the legal system as a whole.
That wasn't what I meant. I was talking about what they're going to put on a warrant. I mean, if they suspect that you have a gun in your house that was used in a murder, they put exactly what they're looking for on the warrant; they can come take that gun but they can't take anything else, even if they find something else incriminating.
What do they do when monitoring email? They can't say "we're looking for him to say such and such a thing." They can use anything you say; it's not limitable to one piece of information.
Fight Spammers!
They should just install carnivore at the cable operator's upstream provider. It's just that simple :). But seriously, they should beef up the wiretapping laws (and penalties) for fone taps.
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Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
How many people have $1000 spare for electing a President? More to the point, 700-some times $100 does not equal a 95 million dollar war chest.
But a breakdown into ranges would indeed be useful.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
over copper wire, over fiber, over the airwaves, whatever, I still just sent
Actually it does matter. A cordless phone transmission doesn't have the same "expectation of privacy" as a cellphone. No court orders are required for a cordless because its considered "public" transmission, just as no court orders are needed to overhear someone on a street corner.
So the question is, do we continue to support a two-tiered privacy system? Affordable "public" vs. the more expensive "private"?
Remember (anyone?) when telephones were partylines? Hasn't there always been a precident for this?
Plain and simple, I have a little more peace of mind and a little more security with my connections because I run a firewall. I get randomly port scanned about 10 times a day, pinged hard and a number of other things about once a week. I know this is common with cable modems, as opposed to dial up connections, however I have better security simply because I installed a firewall, not because my provider gives me any additional level of confidence.
My question is, if you run your own version of sendmail, you likely don't interact with a 'third party' regarding the sending of your email -- your server will contact the receiving server directly to send the mail. Under these circumstances, it seems like running your own server gives you additional grounds to argue that your communications really deserve greater protection than phone conversations. (And you're using PGP anyway, aren't you? :-)
The usual disclaimer applies -- I am not a lawyer, etc, etc.
Exactly where is the line between probable cause and "clear and convincing evidence". If you have to get a court order either way, and you stand the risk of a conviction being overturned if the information is deemed to have been gathered on too flimsy a pretext, wouldn't you allready have to have pretty good evidence for your probable cause? Wouldn't raising the telecom standard just be formalizing this?
I stopped writing slogans on my notebooks in high school, now I need to come up with a sig....
Do what I do. Buy one of those neato cable gateway/router boxes for around $100. Hook it up to a hub and it does DHCP and is totally configurable. That way, the router is the only object on your neighborhood network, and all your computers are on the local network.
:)
It works great
Honestly I'd be a little pissed if I was actually sending anything that anyone cared about. The typoes of transactions I do ar not very sexy, mainly code reviews and design documents for some offshore development we do. I suppose if it wer James Bond type stuff or black hatesque I'd care, but as it is now, it really doesn't bother me, if it's done via vable modem, IPS or VPN.
Its a problem because you don't trust your neighbors. Heck, if you are like most Americans, you probably don't even know your neighbors. If you live in the suburbs, everybody has a house, a car, a yard. Everybody commutes to work. There is no corner grocery store. You don't get together to on a daily basis. You are more likely to invite friends or coworkers who live miles away over to dinner.
This is in sharp contrast to dorm life it college where everybody on the floor knew each other. We would have cried bloody murder if we had not been able to share files by turning on sharing over our network. Local sharing is so much more efficient than going through services like Napste
The question he raised about getting a warrant interested me, however. With a regular search and seizure, as he noted, you must specify what you're looking for. How can you specify what you're looking for with a wiretap or interception of email? Information isn't an item you can just single out and take.
Sure you can. Fair use etc. Also there is the Negroponti analogy of the library. You borrow a book from the library and everyone else has to wait for you to return it before you can check it out again. Borrow a book from the digital library and there is always one left. So what's the difference between copying a bit at stealing a bit?
Actually, this can also be quite useful! A couple of my neighbors always need technical help (with Windows). If I need to transfer something, like diagnostic software, it becomes very easy!
Well, couldn't they just tap the cable co's telcom-based uplink based on the laws?
The laws governing seizures in the US have been so eroded by local law enforcement and the DEA that people not even charged with a crime are having their property taken without any recourse. The drug forfeiture laws, which were in many states, passed to generate revenues for education, have in fact become a way that local agencies can bypass due process and build their own arsenals. When a drug bust occurs involving a substantial amount of property, the local authorities call in the DEA, and by getting the feds involved, are allowed to split the proceeds, circumventing their obligation to education.
The court cases all have intriguing names like US Government vs. 1981 Cadillac El Dorado or US Government vs. $83,000 cash. Even if the charges are dropped against the property owners (or even if the property owners weren't involved in the alleged crime), the government keeps the loot.
For instance, there were three recent interesting cases. The 1st involved someone that ran away after Five-Oh showed up in a high crime area. The cops got very reasonably suspicious, ran him down, and then found that he had a gun. I won't say what the Supreme Court ruled, but it was a 5-4 decision. If you have a clue about the make-up of the court, then you can figure out what side won.
The second case involved law enforcement personnel incidentally feeling a bus passenger's luggage. They get suspicious and look at the contents. This was rejected. Finally, the court ruled that one cannot search somebody based on an anonymous tip.
Right now, the Supreme Court is in a precarious balance. The next President will probably have the opportunity to sway the balance one way or the other.
Finally, I realize how I can be a karma whore. I'm not saying that you are, just that the moderation for this story clearly indicate the method. The Feds are evil, Give me my privacy no matter what the consequences are, did I say that the Feds are evil. Of course, many of you already now this.
The govt. will argue that this will not do, especially when the country is being threatened by all sorts of mean and nasty people (mad hackers, Chinese nuclear physicists, etc.). I guess one of the fall-outs of the fall of the eastern bloc, was that western governments need new "threats" to justify spending billions on military/spying technology. They are therefore claiming that in order to protect us all, they have to develop this technology whereby they will be able to listen to everything we say (and in fact who knows that they aren't doing so already -- we are only discussing laws here, not what they really get up to).
The reason they have let more rigourous cable privacy laws through so far, is that up until now, cable modems weren't on the radar of the types who run these agencies. Now it appears that we will all be using cable modems to talk with each other, they sure as hell will try and listen to it, whether it's legal or not.
A discussion of some of the legal implications of this is in the NY Times "Cyber Law Journal" (free reg. blah blah blah), here. According to this article, the govt. will make a play to apply telephone privacy standards to e-mail (e-mail standards are even lower), make it look as if they are increasing privacy, and then apply the whole nine yards to cable, thereby bringing a whole lot more data into their net.
Given what might or not be construed as legal activity in the near future -- listening to mp3s, wearing copyleft t-shirts, etc. -- it does not look good.
fff
While there may be stringent demands before the FBI can monitor your e-mail over your cable line, if the FBI gets what they want with Carnivore, the additional protections will be meaningless.
If they have the ability to monitor your cable company's backbone provider and skim through all e-mail to find yours in particular, - they've bypassed the cable companies infrastructure entirely and the requirements that go along with it.
--Aaron Greenberg
:
Pray that the government does nothing for fear that they will screw it all up anyway.
Read stories by Philidelphia RNC protesters of police abuse in jails and on the streets.
From Independent Media Center, read: Released Dallas activist recounts jail abuses [...] From Z Magazine Online, read: Report from Philadelphia From Salon Magazine, read: Taking it from the streets
And don't forget Abner Luima, the recent LA/Rampart, CA police terrorists, and the NY Central Park attacks while police stood by and watched....
When your government invades your privacy, colludes with individual private corporations to bend legislation to their favor, enacts insane intelectual property laws to favor only the elite, repeals tax laws which only the rich and elite can utilize, disarms the population, and begins unconstitutionally using brute force on citizens, you can be sure something serious is fucked up. Are you ready for American refugees?
Welcome to fascism, for real.
Under Current law it could be argued that I as a cable subscriber, because the message was initially transmitted over my cable network that if it is tapped anywhere (even beyond that network) that it is inadmissible.
Furthermore an email intercepted outside the cable network (transmitted by an in network subscriber). It could be argued that it is possible that the contents of the email are altered (email is not secure through all nodes) and therefore inadmissible.
-Not an insult simply devils advocate
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
Not only should they not change these laws, they should use them across the board, not on just cable!
That's because it's ridiculous to make privacy laws based on the medium. If I send an e-mail over copper wire, over fiber, over the airwaves, whatever, I still just sent an e-mail. And that should have the same privacy protections, (even though sending it UNENCRYPTED over the airwaves is phenomenally stupid as well...) because I did the same thing. I just sent an e-mail.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Should the U.S. 'dumb down' these protections to be equivalent to telecom, or should they beef up telecom's protections to be equal to the cable industry?
What kind of question is that?
Should the government take ALL your money or just half
Should you ask your parents before you buy a new TV?
Should I make sure it's ok with my dog before I got to the movies?
Should I pour hot grits down my pants?
Obviously the group that should violate privacy less than any other is the damn gobernment.... THEY WORK FOR US!!! I hate how you always have to remind people that...
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
gotta love the dk
Q: The question becomes: Should the U.S. 'dumb down' these protections to be equivalent to telecom, or should they beef up telecom's protections to be equal to the cable industry?"
A: Beef up.
Next question...
If I turn on file sharing (i have a cable modem), the entire neighborhood has access to my shared files. Kind of inconvinient if you have a small LAN set up in a home environment, but else then that, cable modems and the service are quite good. :)
Help me through college please!
I think that interception of information, in the form of telephone wiretaps, digital gathering of private email, etc... should be treated exactly like property seizure, no matter what the medium.
Even this has been taken out of context; cops can search for 'evidence'.
The original point of requiring a warrant was that the police (or whoever) would have to say 'Look, we firmly believe based on XX and XX ansd XX that Mr. So-and-so has the following items in his house. If we had these items, we could solve the crime; so the judge would order that they had permission to enter his home and search for and take away these items. Why does a judge need to do this? BEcause.. oroginall, and ideally, *NOBODY* has the right to take anything taht is yours. Nobody. THat's what a warrant is for.
Nowadays, i'ts abused beyond belief.
Beef up telecom.
People's privacy is on the line...
We should increase the protections against govermental and business intrusions.
In the United States, we only have the freedoms that we fight for. We have surrendered them to business and the government slowly over time. We must stop.
Fight Spammers!
In a sense, this is at least a logical bill that was passed. Where convincing evidence must be produced before a wiretap of a cable line is done. I'm sure law enforcement agencies hate this concept because it adds just another roadblock in their way. But at least it helps prevent abuse by law enforcement for using these almost unconstrained laws to their own gains. I'm normally completely against law enforcement using wiring tapping or any electronic survellience what-so-ever - but this is due to my outrage of how computer 'crackers' or script-kiddies can be fined outragous amounts of money or get serious prison time - while someone found guilty of crimes which involve other peoples lives get a slap on the wrist. Bah. The Law, Politics, and just about anything involving government sucks. Nothing we can do but listen to punk rock :)
http://www.lycaeum.org -unbiased information on drugs. :)
However your one statement:
I think that interception of information, in the form of telephone wiretaps, digital gathering of private email, etc... should be treated exactly like property seizure, no matter what the medium.
Struck me as ironic. I'll bet half the slashdot crowd is cheering along shouting "Hell Yeah!", and if you look at the whole Napster mess, there is a strange similarity. Can't have it both ways.
As a side note, Congress will eventually begin to explore taxing telephony; the telecos will lobby them to death.
'such spanning power'? Let's get this straight, here. The post isn't about allowing the feds free reign to read and see everything you do. It's about allowing them to gather information after there's already evidence that you're doing something illegal, and that watching your communications will provide more evidence. Whether or not the police are corrupt is another matter, but tying their hands behind their backs doesn't help anyone.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Your statement prods my memory for a common saying that should be engraved into the foreheads of the ignorant...
"They made a law to take away all the guns, but I didn't say anything, because I didn't own a gun..."
-In the event that you disagree with the previous comment, be advised that you are most likely right anyway.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Further... If you run your own Sendmail daemon, and it happens to be v8.11.0, and has TLS configured. Can they even scan your headers?
Temkin
I mean really, should we give more power to this government we trust absolutely to always act in our best interests?
Such spanning powers should only be enacted in times of war. (And I don't mean the war on drugs.) Thats the only time national security is really so threatened.
Just my thoughts.
just encrypt all your email with pgp and your data with hard disk encryption. carnivore cant touch your email, and if they take your computer, well, you set up your computer to delete the keys if it is handled the wrong way, right? my only gripe is that the encryption keys are too small. for linux, a loopback encrypted filesystem can use one of several algorithms, but most only use 128 bit keys. i hear blowfish can go up to 384. why not?
The gov't also working for you means the gov't protecting your rights both to privacy and to prosecute others who commit crimes against you.
It's a very delicate balance...
that's about all I can say.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
The funny part is, is that the fed is continually trying to enforce and tweak laws to meet technology problems. Unfortunately the laws were written 100 years or more ago and simply do not port well to technology. The representatives and members simply do not understand. Get involved with your senator or congressman and talk to them. It's actually quite easy. I've never heard of one not being willing to meet with a consituant.
-ttm
I think that Telecom rights should be upgraded, because consumer privacy is a huge issue about the Internet. If the government downgraded cable modem owner's privacy rights, there would be serious lawsuits filed against them. If anything, we need more protection, and I believe we need that protection on the phone, too. It's sad that Police officers can tap our phones and listen in on our private conversations. We pay the phone company for a phone number, and that's it. We don't pay them so we can be incriminated. Privacy is what we have left in the world, it's absurd that they're trying to strip us of it.
Well, @Home has restrictions on that for me - they block all incoming traffic to ports 137-139, effectively blocking SMB/NMB traffic.
And, if you use secure passwords, thing should be fine even on a cable network - DOCSIS prevents other people sniffing stuff for you.
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Keep NOSPAM to reply
However, my point still stands in that these fears are antiquated. As a result, the applications of the ammendment must be called into question.
I'm not sure I agree with your assessment that militias are obsolete today. To take a modern example, the Black Panthers could be perceived as a militia formed to ensure that people's rights (namely the right not to get the bejesus beat out of oneself by the pigs) were protected. As an even more modern example, the Y2K scare caused a surge in gun purchases among Americans; a great many Americans were sufficiently frightened of the possibility of chaos and the inability of their government to protect them in the event of such chaos to appreciate their Second Amendment rights. I suspect the Second Amendment/gun control issue isn't as clean an analogy as you want for this discussion.
For practical purposes the FBI covets the ability to monitor all communications to and from criminal suspects. Without Carnivore it is difficult for them to guarantee that they can do this monitoring on electronic communications with any measure of completeness. While I understand their wanting to have this capability, it doesn't mean that I accept that they should have it.
Frankly, after observing firsthand an FBI criminal investigation, I don't trust the FBI with the information they could divine about me with Carnivore, and I think that few would if they gave the matter much consideration. If I were to fall under investigation for some reason, and as part of a criminal investigation they were to scan the traffic to one of my throwaway email accounts (claudiusclaudius@yahoo.com, e.g.), then I will be profiled as a goatpr0n lover and pyramid-scheme participant based on the spam I get there. Since FBI investigative procedure as often as not involves finding a suspect as fast as possible by fitting candidates to a criminal "profile" and then digging up all the dirt they can on the suspect to (hopefully) tie him or her to the crime, I am uncomfortable with their assurances that Carnivore will not be abused. Even if not abused, I don't want the spam sent my way to affect their perception of me, and I certainly don't want my grandmother to read about my alleged goatpr0n fixation in the New York Times. Recall how Richard Jewel was pilloried in the press for his love of pr0n because law enforcement leaked their having found a skin mag in his apartment.
Ummm... yes... it did. My point was that OBVIOUSLY the law on the cable is more representitive of what people want than the law on wire... If the different standards are going to converge they MUST converge towards the law on cable.. if not better.
So you say I make no sense and yet you reiterate the same damn thing I was saying in a much less interesting way... good job... your the man!
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
With out (or even with) a digital signature no email should ever be admissable, for anything, ever. How can one prove I actually typed it? Its not like a voice tap where you can confirm a voice match... I think the real problem is checking email to find out who is being naughty and then using further methods to get substantial evidence.. and then they never even have to mention the email in court.
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
This would be a great idea...If we trusted our elected officials any more than the appointed/hired ones that control the FBI, CIA, NSA, ad infitum. The same has been said about copyright, which is becoming an antiquated set of laws in addition to being unclear and foolish in the first place; yet, I have seen nobody in our government step up and say, "Here is my plan for changing copyright laws to deal with the technology and ideas of the next millenium." The chance that our beloved legislature(s) will step up to the plate and rewrite laws regarding wire-tapping, search and seizure, etc. is very small (and if they do, they'll F it up anyway). The devil you know is better than the devil you don't. Take the precautions you can; they'll only get better.
I'm in one of AT&T's markets where I get my cable, internet AND phone service over what was formerly just my TV cable. I wonder which law applies since it's the same pipe for everything?
Wanna stop those random port scans? Worried about your data? Use new ZoneAlarm from www.zonelabs.com
"Out the 100Base-T port, through the router, off the bridge, past the firewall..... Nothing but Net."
What should happen? They should beef up telecom's protections to be equal to the cable industry.
What will happen? They will 'dumb down' these protections to be equivalent to telecom.
Hasn't anyone been paying attention? In a few months, privacy won't be the Topic of the Moment and the government will continue its conquest of your personal space.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
The point of the post is the divergence of the law on the same thing.
Your post makes no sense. HELLO?!
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Does anyone know the rational for the cable law requiring the higher standard of Clear and Convincing to obtain a warrant rather than the usual Search Warrant standard of Probable Cause? The Fourth Amendment only requires probable cause, but a good rational might be used to get the standard raised to clear and convincing evidence for all internet related searches. Certainly, at minimum, the government must not be allowed to intercept email or determine what web sites you use without a warrant supported by an affidavit containing at least probable cause to believe that you are breaking the law. It should make no difference what the medium is - search your house for paper, search your ISP's server for your email or what have you. All of it, under the Fourth Amendment, should require at least that level of judicial oversight. . .
The whole problem is due to the piecemeal manner the US gov tries to patch up existing laws to face the stampeding progress of communications technology (which just shows tech people are smarter than dem slow rich lawyers :))
Instead of using "medium" (i.e. cable, telco blah blah) centric laws, they should just admit that existing laws are just not good enough and sit down to rewrite a new "information-use law" that apply to "information", and not the medium that carry them.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.