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.

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

[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.
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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?

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.

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?

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]