Government Internet Surveillance Up

Harvey Manfrenjensenton writes "According to this story at Newhouse News Service, the assault on Americans' rights known as the Patriot Act, passed by Congress in October, has produced results that are as disturbing -- and rampant -- as could have been anticipated. Law enforcement used to need a court order to tap your phone, read your mail, etc. Now they just need a whim. ISP's and Telcos can barely keep up with the volume of requests by Feds wanting to read your email." EFF's analysis of the Patriot Act is good reading.

Comments

No real surprise

[YouAreFatMan]

America is the land of individualism and extremism. You can't just have a little, you want the whole enchilada, and who cares if anyone else goes hungry. So it's no suprise that the government, given a little power, immediately begins to abuse it. In America, we abuse everything -- food, drugs, the law, other people, etc. We lionize the "rogue cop who doesn't play by the rules," yet this is the guy grabbing us on the street and shaking us down for ID for no good reason. People think, hey I've got an important job to do, so it's OK if I stretch the rules. So of course the FBI and other law-enforcement types will do that. I remember reading an article about the cameras that they put all over England, and how the people who run them have a deep respect for the authority they are wielding and the limits they are supposed to respect. In the US, there's no way those guys would have any restraint. OK, so I'm ranting, but the point is, that the US culture does not lend itself to granting a great degree of unchecked power to any group, be it government, corporate, whatever.

How can e-mail be evidence?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I feel like e-mailing my friend that "his midnight plutonium shipment to pier 27 will be delayed until 1:30am" just for the heck of it, can I? Or will the feds knock my door down within 10 minutes?

Re:Good.

[Istealmymusic]

Or to quote Ben:

They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.

Well said, but I prefer:

A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
Is worth a whole eternity in bondage. -- Arendt Hannahs

Reading random quotes by activists and great thinkers can be very enlightening, I highly recommend The Quotations Page, providing quotes since 1994 - quite inspiring.

Email, email, email....

[anthony_dipierro]

I just wish I could convince my friends to use PGP when sending me email. That would solve most of the problems.

Right of privacy and the Constitution

[Seth Finkelstein]

The following passage seems relevant

Findlaw - Rights Retained by the People

(emphasis added)

The Ninth Amendment had been mentioned infrequently in decisions of the Supreme Court4 until it became the subject of some exegesis by several of the Justices in Griswold v. Connecticut. There a statute prohibiting use of contraceptives was voided as an infringement of the right of marital privacy. Justice Douglas, writing the opinion of the Court, asserted that the ''specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.'' Thus, while privacy is nowhere mentioned, it is one of the values served and protected by the First Amendment, through its protection of associational rights, and by the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments as well. The Justice recurred to the text of the Ninth Amendment, apparently to support the thought that these penumbral rights are protected by one Amendment or a complex of Amendments despite the absence of a specific reference. Justice Goldberg, concurring, devoted several pages to the Amendment.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Re:Right of privacy and the Constitution

[StArSkY]

What is the purpose of government... as a whole. To administer, and to implement the wishes of the people. The FBI is a department of government and as such should fall under the same moral and ethical obligations.

Surely the fact that information is sent electronically should mean it is treated no differently from paper or phone calls.

Does the government have the right to open mail addressed to you? Does the government have the right to listen to your phone calls?

The answer is yes of they have "reasonable" grounds to suspect you have or will commit a criminal act.

The solution is not specific legislation or objection based upon medium, but an application of exsiting pronciples to a new meium.

Re:Right of privacy and the Constitution

[BrookHarty]

I think the 4th admendment says it all.

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.

Secure - Free from the risk of being intercepted by unauthorized persons.

There is too much to discuss about this, but it comes down to word "Reasonable". And this changes from person to person.

You find it "Resonable" to trade Privacy for Security. Patriot ACT on that thought was "Reasonable" to some men and women to combat terrorisism.

I find that "Unreasonable". The founding fathers had to deal with "Unreasonable" searchs under Kings Law, they would have no such repeat.
-
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Bad News

[Anonymous Coward]

Connect from host: departmentjustice02.erols.com/208.58.140.194 to TCP port: 21

I don't run an ftp server, never advertised one, never been into any sort of warez, just have a mail server. And I see that in my logs. What the fuck is going on?

reading my email

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a student here from Iran (my girlfriend has a friend dating him) almost every time he emails me (we both use Yahoo email) my browser security gets switched "on" then "off" (i have it set to warn me when switching from-to secure mode)it switches with no page change (i have to acept the changs the way i have it set)
then i go to yahoo mail....never has happend with any email except from him.

Re:Good.

[Jehosephat2k]

"Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt." -Patrick Henry, June 5, 1788

Orwellian??!?!!?!

[jsimon12]

Anything named the "Patriot Act" has to be bad for you. I personally am frightened everytime I hear the term "Homeland Security" reminds me too much of being in Nazi Germany, or Oceania.

Tell us SlashDot Editors...

[Dave21212]

What have they asked you for lately ?

I'm not joking ;) Yeah, I know /. is not a telco or ISP but I'll bet Someone has asked you for Something by now.

Anyone else here feel safe enough to post 'anonymous' or otherwise on what they have been asked for ?

The real worry...

[smack_attack]

Right now we are lucky... lucky because there is a giant imbalance between information and the means to process it.

But that gap is going to shrink... as more programmers and database analysts get hired and design methods for extracting the information given to them.

Do you really think the government's insatiable hunger for information is going to diminish? The key to finding terrorists is not in looking at their criminal history, racial profiling or by their favorite books.The key is in finding those who dissent against certain policies of the US and take a best guess at whether they are committed enough to lash out against them that they are willing to take their own life or other's lives in order to acheive attention for their cause.

So think about that the next time you complain about gun laws or taxes or the war on drugs or whether your speeding ticket was unfair. Because when the supply of information is dwarfed by the ability to interpret it, it may be your front door that gets kicked down at three in the morning.

Security through Obscurity?

[jcsehak]

If they're sending so many subpoenas that ISPs can't keep up, then doesn't that make it harder for the really important requests to go through? I mean, if this keeps up, then won't it give real terrorists a "buffer zone" of time in which they can send unencrypted emails and act on them before the feds can even get the emails from the ISPs?

Priority Problem

[Ender77]

This is good example of why Priority downloads and uploads never worked well in internet desighns. As soon as someone relized that if they set their downloads to high priority then they will get super speeds on all their transfers. Unfortunetely, everybody else soon did the same and it ended up actually SLOWING the system down or just flat out crashing it.

Something similiar will probably happen with this. The companies wont be able to keep up with the demand and will probably close down or get the tech indistry to bribe congress into repelling (or at least limit) the law since they are loosing money doing this.

Re:USA PATRIOT Act

[adminispheroid]

The problem is that the government has to waste several hours tracking down the judge to get the warrant signed.

The point is, that is not a waste of time -- it is an investment of time that pays off in freedom and justice for all of us. As the guy you're replying to already explained more eloquently than I can; so let me suggest you read his message a couple more times and see if you get it.

So if the FBI finds out you have met somebody they're investigating for a crime, you want them to have the right to search your house, without asking a judge for permission, just because you might possibly conceivably possess some evidence they could use against that person?

Too often people cast this debate in terms of whether we are for or against the police. The fact is, the police aren't doing their job if they don't do everything allowed by law that might help their investigations. I don't fault the FBI for taking advantage of this law -- I fault Congress for passing it, and the White House idiot for signing it. It's the job of these people to set the limits on the police in way that's consistent with American values, not Fascist police state values.

how law enforcement works

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that way to many people have no idea how law enforcement actually works most of the time, and they just get blinded by the few times that stupid people in the govt. do stupid things

Okay, you want to know how law enforcement works?

Recently I ordered a substance over the internet that had been legal until sometime last year, when it was vaguely made illegal under an "analogue" act (something that I, and various lawyers I contacted later, were not aware of). The same internet site also sells another substance that is tightly controlled.

Well, when my package arrived, so did a US customs official and at least four local cops. They questioned me for 20 minutes in my foyer. They were physically threatening, verbally misleading, and they could not tell me what crime I had committed. They did suggest a crime (ordering the tightly-controlled substance), and they were intent on getting me confess to that.

They entered my apartment without a warrant, and proceeded to sieze property. They took lots of statements, and accused me of being a drug dealer based on the fact that I listen to techno. They assumed they would find a drug lab, and they did not.

Later I talked to some lawyers, and they said that I could "probably" get the search suppressed. Probably?!

Nothing has come of it so far, most likely because they have no evidence of what I ordered. Their entire operation was illegal, and they went out of their way to subvert the rights that I have. If I had been less forthright in asserting them, I easily could have confessed to a crime that I did not commit, landed in court, or in jail. If they had gotten a confession, or found what they were looking for, they would have prosecuted me, warrant or not.

Original quote from the Devil's Dictionary

[piranha(jpl)]

FWIW, the original quote from the Devil's Dictionary:

PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

Re:feds asking isp's for access?

[SealBeater]

Surely the feds could quite easily gain some sort of access to put packet
sniffers on an isp's network and read anyones email, without the need to ask
the ISP's or Telco's.

Sure they could, however nothing they gathered would have been admissible in
court. In addition, if they were caught, it would lead to severe punishment
under the former laws. Illegal wiretapping and conducting an illegal
investigation used to be very strictly enforced, even if the prepatrator was
the FBI. Now, they can gather whatever they wish, use it in a court of law if
anything ever turns up and not have to prove that you did anything wrong to
get their attention in the first place. Whatever happens to us, remember, we
deserve it because we didn't stop it.

SealBeater

Re:It is not about reading your e-mail

[Kronovohr]

Strange idea...
[paranoid mode] They're also working to crack down on spam. I wonder if the two events are coinciding -- it seems like the more spam one receives, the more a pain in the ass it is for investigators to wade through the bullshit, and the more likely they are to miss something.
Think about this: someone sends an email to someone with the subject "HERBAL VIAGRA -- STAY HARD FOR HOURS!", though the body of the message is something desirable to the FBI. Considering after a while of wading through crap, they would just ignore something with said subject line, thereby potentially missing something crucial.
If they really are planning to crack down on spam, this may be the motive behind it.
[/paranoid mode]