Slashdot Mirror
Browsing Privacy - Off With Your Headers!
andyo writes: "Incredible assertion in this Wired article that 'Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the identities of their e-mail correspondents, or the addresses of Web pages they visit.' Cites two senators who I'd thought to be more clueful (Orrin Hatch and Chuck Schumer)." Sure, the FBI should be able to check out every URL I visit without a warrant. They'll never abuse that power.
What is scaring you guys with these proposals??? The FBI may scan your emails? Log your web-traffic? What about every curious sys. admin. in every ISP that your traffic goes throu? They all already have the power to do this. If you expect to have a private conversation with the expectation that it will not appear tommorrow on page 1 of every newspaper, encrypt the communication, otherwise assume everyone can and is reading what you send. For goodness sake, why bother to make it harder for the FBI than it is for a sys. admin?
A ``reasonable expectation of privacy'' for the identities of people you correspond with via email? Guys, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in email period, encrypted email notwithstanding. One of my friends had the sysadmin at her company reading through her email recently, including a couple of emails from her fiancee, and this sonufabitch was actually reading her emails aloud to a (female) co-worker he was trying to impress.
Your emails are not private. If you think they are, you're stupid and living under a rock. We know this here on Slashdot; after all, we advocate using email encryption, we set up anonymous remailers, etc., exactly because we don't expect privacy otherwise.
So now a couple of senators are saying ``hey, Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the identities of their correspondents'', and what are we saying? Sounds like ``how dare they!''
Gee. Color us hypocritical.
Same argument applies to HTTP headers. Guys, you're sending traffic across an unencrypted, insecure wire. What expectation of privacy do you really have? We understand that HTTP is an insecure protocol and we even expect that HTTP headers will be abused by pretty much anyone who can make a buck off it. But when senators who hold political opinions most Slashdotters don't like say that ``Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their HTTP headers'', suddenly we're up in arms?
For the love of God, people. Figure out what you believe and take an unambiguous stand for it.
And while you're at it, grow up.
could you please explain why Slashdot/OSDN continues to use web-bugs to track users? Where's the concern for privacy of your own visitors?
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't the DMCA help here. I thought that the DMCA stated that it was against the law for a person to decrypt something that was not intended for them. Couldn't an argument be made that the HTTP requests are encoded using an extremely week encryption algorithm called ASCII, a symmetric key algorithm that maps a byte to a character?
Well, Orrin Hatch and Chuck Scumer don't think people should have any privacy the continuing thread is they, themselves, are not entitled to privacy either. So, the only way to fight bastards like this that don't have any respect for the Constitution or the principles this country was founded on is to dig into their privacy, and release that information to the media.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM