California Governor to Ask for Broader Wiretaps

koganuts writes: "According to The Los Angeles Times, California governor Gray Davis '...is calling for expanded authority to wiretap Californians' phones and e-mail in the name of protecting against terrorism.' 'Nuff said."

Comments

Welcome to Californa, please hand over your rights

[digitalmuse]

Well, am I the only one who's bowels clench at the sound of this? Does this mean that e-mails that get routed through California-based servers will be subject to this? What about California residents who have mail servers in different states... their mail 'originates' in the sunny fascist state of CA, but it doesn't get stored there. How about California residents who send e-mail while outside of their home state.
I can only hope that a massive influx of hard, direct questions to the office of the Governor of California - Gray Davis(governor@governor.ca.gov) that this is unacceptable to the people of his constituency.
The /. crowd is fairly militant and reactionary over these issues, but I for one am going to try and do a little more than normal about this. Time to draft an e-mail to all my family members who live in California and see if I can get a few of them to take action on this.
It would also be grand if someone could post a link to (or transcript of) the governor's State of the State speech tonight.
If anyone else is aware of grassroot groups that are actively and positively working on raising the public's awareness to this kind of knee-jerk violation of our rights, please post applicable links here, and see what we can do to keep this getting any worse.

unreasonable searches and seizures

[wberry]

The ACLU's Web site details its opposition to expanded surveillance authority in the Patriot Act. The new federal law lowers the standard for obtaining wiretap authority, the site says, requiring judges to rubber-stamp any request law-enforcement deems "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation."

And, it says, the law extends "this low threshold of proof to Internet communications that are far more revealing than the numbers dialed to or from a telephone, and to portions of e-mail communications that cannot readily be separated from content."

On its face, the law seems reasonable because a warrant is required. However, the judge is effectively forced by law to agree to the warrant. Therefore, it isn't a warrant at all. Even the word 'warrant' itself means that a search or seizure should be warranted, that is, justified. But even unjustified searches and seizures are allowed under the "Patriot Act" if prosecutors invoke the magic word 'terrorism'.

This is why I wrote my checks to the ACLU and the EFF on September 20th. I was afraid that things like this would happen. Sometimes it is good to be wrong.

And another thing about these "pen-register" taps on Internet transmissions. If the police investigating you get a list of phone numbers, they know who you've been calling and that's it. If they have a warrant (a real one) that's a very reasonable search IMO. I think it would also be reasonable if, under terms of a search warrant, law enforcement could obtain a trace of all your DNS traffic. But if they get a full URL history they know everything there is to know (except HTTP POST data and cookies)!

Have you ever really examined your browser history? Not the stuff on the pulldown tab, the stuff in the unadvertised 2 meg file buried deep in the browser directories. You will remember everything you ever read and did on the Internet if you see it. That is incredibly unreasonable IMO, especially when it is seized under a "Patriot Act" un-warrant.

Re:i dont see much a problem....

[mendepie]

the Patriot Act has a four year sunset, since it was indended to deal with terorists associtated with the current "war".

Davis has not made any comment about this, and has not even suggested that the "war" is the reason. So in effect he is asking for more than the feds have (or at least will (hopefully) have in 4 years).