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DOJ Wants ISPs to Log User Traffic UPDATED
Anonymous Coward writes "Kevin Poulson writes in an article in
SecurityFocus that in an early draft of the
White House's "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace", the DOJ proposes that the US
enact European style 'data retention' laws,
which force ISPs to log and retain all of your
email headers, as well as your Web browsing
history." Nothing worse for the DOJ to be upstaged by Europe in oppressive lawmaking, they must feel like they're losing their edge. Update: 06/19 23:04 GMT by M : The SecurityFocus article has been updated with this note, saying that the U.S. denies having any plans for data-retention laws. Guess we'll have to wait until the plan is released to see.
I'll have to meet real girls instead of browsing pr0n.
Maybe, I dunno. But anyway... this sucks. Doesn't anyone at the DOJ realize that keeping a history of web browsing is about the equivalent of having someone follow you around with a pen and some paper and record the address of every place you visit during the day? I don't understand how keeping track of information like this can possibly help with security or ANYTHING for that matter.
If you need to interpret my post, then you don't get it.
Article seems slashdotted, so I haven't read it yet... but what does this mean for those of us who run our own mail servers? Do we know have retention and reporting requirements on our systems at home?
Logging such a huge volume of data requires massive hard-drive space, extra CPU power, extra manpower. All of those things cost money.
Considering how little money ISP's tend to make, I don't see this as at all fair, unless the government will pony up the cash.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
I wonder if Zero Knowledge, Inc. might decide that it might be time to re-introduce their personal anonymous web browsing service.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
I visited the site, and this is what it says here. I'm posting it in case the site gets slashdotted. [And I'm not a karma whore since I already have 50.]
U.S. Denies Data Retention Plans
The Justice Department refutes claims that Internet service providers could be forced to spy on their customers as part of the U.S. strategy for securing cyberspace.
By Kevin Poulsen, Jun 19 2002 12:24PM
An early draft of the White House's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace envisions the same kind of mandatory customer data collection and retention by U.S. Internet service providers as was recently enacted in Europe, according to sources who have reviewed portions of the plan.
But a Justice Department source said Wednesday that data retention is mentioned in the strategy only as an industry concern -- ISPs and telecom companies oppose the costly idea -- and does not reflect any plan by the department or the White House to push for a U.S. law.
In recent weeks, the administration has begun doling out bits and pieces of a draft of the National Strategy to technology industry members and advocacy groups. On Tuesday, sources who had reviewed segments of the plan said a federal data retention law is suggested in a section written in part by the Justice Department.
The comprehensive strategy is being assembled by the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, headed by cyber security czar Richard Clarke, and is intended as a collaborative road map for further action by government agencies, private industry, and Congress.
While not binding, proposals that find their way into the final version of the National Strategy would likely have added weight in Congress, and could lead to legislation.
A controversial directive passed by the European Parliament last month allows the 15 European Union member countries to force ISPs to collect and keep detailed logs of each customer's traffic, so that law enforcement agencies could access it later.
Data to be gathered under the European plan includes the headers (from, to, cc and subject lines) of every e-mail each customer sends or receives, and every user's complete Web browsing history. The period of time that the data will have to be retained is up to each member country; specific legislative proposals range from 12 months to seven years, according to Cedric Laurant, policy fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which opposed the directive.
"Somebody could see their past for the last seven years be completely open," says Laurant, speaking of the European directive. "It violates freedom of speech," as well as the legal principal that a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The White House did not return phone calls on the National Strategy, which is scheduled for release in September.
Finally got through, and ... Nothing to worry about yet. Apparently, this is from a misreading of the report. No data retention requirements, these aren't the droids you're looking for, move along.
Wow...
Now the DOJ will have the biggest Free Password List on the web..
Could you imagine the amount of money they could make from X-10 pop-under ads...
At least the government will probably be required to disclose what they do.
Your best bet is to not send any sensitive info over email, and don't store any unencrypted sensitive or private data in online storage systems.
Perhaps the DOJ should be able to find out the title of every book I purchase, every TV show I watch, what kind of hamburger I buy.
Wholesale spying is not justified by the war on terrorism. Especially for us non-Arab, born and raised in America types. It's just an excuse for the government to do something they've wanted to do for a long time anyway.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
What I want to know is how this impacts those of use who own/operate our own domains and SMTP server (i.e. those of us who do not use ISP supplied SMTP servers to send out mail). Will we be forced to log our own traffic for fear mean old Uncle Ashcroft wants to know who we emailed three years ago? Will we have to enact some sort of robust long term backup of these logs (i.e. fire resistant safes and offsite backups of logs)? What if, through no fault of our own, a fire destroys the last weeks worth of backups and Uncle Bush needs yesterdays logs (i.e. how paranoid about backing things up do we need to be)?
--
I think the appropriate answer to the DoJ is "Give us a big enough pipe, we'll forward the data to you, and you can archive the hell out of it if you like."
Drown them in their own sauce. Before long, they'll be telling all the ISPs in the country "UNCLE!"
If nothing else, we'll get a BIG increase in the capacity of the Internet backbone before it's all over. Note for the humor-impaired: This suggestion is a joke. I think the bozo at DoJ who proposed this should be fired/recalled for constitutional abuse of power for even suggesting this.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
It seems that the issue at hand isn't the act of logging activities themselves, but how willing your ISP is to distribute those logs. In all previous cases I am aware of, ISP's do not give out personal information about a user without first being served with a subpoena. This is no worse than the restrictions we have had on wiretapping and eavesdropping for the past 50 or so years, so I don't see any reason for anyone to get upset about this. If you aren't breaking the law, then you have nothing to worry about, and your information will remain private in the hands of your service provider, however if you're doing something illegal, then there is no reason that the FBI or such should not be able to serve your ISP with a subpoena to obtain your usage logs. Its perfectly within our Constitutional rights for the government to do this, and anyone who is made nervous because of this probably has something to hide.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I have a better idea. The UN should pass a law requiring that all network traffic in the world, whether on a home LAN or through the Internet, must pass through one central checkpoint machine that will log all the traffic. This will provide a worldwide data retention center where authorities and large corporations can perform queries to figure out exactly what someone was doing. (Obviously, defendants won't be allowed to perform similar queries, because that wouldn't be fair.)
Oh yeah... And the central machine that would fulfill this function would be a 386 SX with a tape drive serving as RAM, running Windows XP Professional, and it would be connected to the Internet through a 1200 baud modem. This will make true worldwide broadband a reality and keep the economy strong.
This is only slightly different than forcing telcos to retain phone records, with one exception.
Many URL's can be used to guess WHAT data you've been looking at without actually looking at the website. For example, if someone saw the URL: http://www.nakedkids.com they would assume that it was child porn and whomever looked at it should be red-flagged and investigated. Quite possibly however this site could have NOTHING to do with porn and could simply have a questionable DNS name.
Perhaps if ISPs were only allowed to track IP addresses....
Even if the DoJ were to keep a log of your web browsing, who's to say it was you sitting at the keyboard?
I can see people making scripts to go to all sorts of "undesireable sites", and when they get busted, they can prove they were nowhere near the computer at the time.
Would also smoke out all sorts of surveillance schemes.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has admitted he blundered over plans dubbed a "snooper's charter" to give a raft of public bodies in the UK access to private e-mail and mobile phone records.
The proposals are to be put on hold indefinitely in the face of huge opposition, which the home secretary conceded his department totally failed to predict. (...)
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsYou always hear the analogy that email is just sending a postcard... well, its about time that we start to make email "envelopes" (aka encryption) standard for ALL email.
I think Joe Sixpack would be more inclined to use encryption if he thought it was just an envelope to put mail into... he doesn't need to know about technojargon like PGP, GPG, SSL, S/MIME, X.509 certificates, just tell him its an "email envelope" instead of the old postcard he's used to.
The only thing that really needs to be public is the To address. Everything else could be encrypted (enclosed in the envelope) except for maybe a couple fields like the From Address and the maybe the Subject Line (but even those could be "inside").
What needs to happen before email encryption becomes a "standard" thing that everyone uses all the time?
http://freenetproject.org or something like it.
There used to be anonymous re-mailers like penet and some by cypherpunks (C2) that would be nice to have around. I think spam usage killed off those remailers that survived the suits by the Church of Scientology.
What the U.S. government doesn't realize is that the same unreasonable searches of your cyberhome that they think will do "something" to combat terrorism (it's arguable just how much genuine security this gains), are also the same policies that, as they are mimicked worldwide, will make it easier for oppressive regimes (North Korea, Iraq, China, Saudi Arabia, etc.) to clamp down on political dissent and the free exchange of ideas in their nations.
I can only presume that the Bush administration has decided for us that some small amount of potential security under hypothetical circumstances is worth the cost in freedom of expression, not only in the United States but around the world.
And here was I, thinking that the U.S. was a standard bearer promoting democracy and the principles of human rights embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If Kevin Poulsen was still up to his old tricks today, this would be exactly the sort of setup that would ensure he was busted very quickly...
Freedom: "I won't!"
" If they think for ONE f*cking second that this would actually work, they're wrong. Ill just start encrypting my email more often. Lets see them get through to my mail headers under 128bit RSA."
Yeah, that's a good plan: Give them a reason to think you're up to no good. That'll keep'em from investigating ya.
"Derp de derp."
Many other posters have already commented that the update to the story says the Gub'ment denies attempts to do this. I'm surprised this story wasn't taken with a grain of salt in the first place...you know this wouldn't stand up to any kind of court scrutiny.
Really, the idea that the government can arbitrarily spy on anybody, but only look at later if they have a reason, violates your 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable searches (OT: sometimes I feel bad for the 3rd Amendment...it just gets completely ignored. Nobody ever takes to the streets demanding their 3rd Amendment rights be protected. Oh well). The federal government has no power to inventory your entire home, or keep a list of every person with whom you correspond by mail, and as such, they have no similar power to log your email headers or http requests. I don't see this one happening any time soon.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Who cares what the government logs, when all you simply do is encipher all your traffic to trusted hosts. With anonymous Proxy services being easy to use and setup... more people will simply take notice that they exist, and begin to use them. Some people might even resort to paying a premium to under the counter internet service from their Broadband having friends Finux server. I wonder if this legislation takes into consideration that IP6 can travel right atop of traditional ip4, and can trick out attempts to monitor top level protocols, like email. Besides, you opt out of the monitoring by simply opting out of your providers email facilities. Other forms of message passing exist, and are in use by motivated people.
The USA is the top internet using place on the planet, and Europe is no doubt second, with Asia/Pac being third. So how the USA officials plan to effectively monitor the data required is interesting. Logically one is left to wonder how well the USA carnivore system is working these days, and its sister Echelon. To resort to forcing these ISP to log data on behalf of the government officials seems very controversial. Almost as if the government is passing on the burden of Carnivore on the backs of the struggling ISP's in America. The interesting thing is: who is to prevent the ISP from simply not logging all the data the government officials claim to require? How would they be able to prove the ISP otherwise?
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
The way i viewed it was much akin to the Australian censorchip laws. Its probably a token political effort designed to say theyre protecting the children and stopping terrorism. Its extremely hard to pin down anything really, and if you want to remain unknown, theres always the library.
So I'd say, its political point scoring, with no real teeth to it. But hey, it could always be that they progressed to the next chapter of 1984.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
How would they decide what is loggable and what is not? By looking at ports 80 and 25? The solution to that is simple, switch all your "sensitive" browsing to port 666. Use PGP for your email or perhaps use something as mundane as ICQ, or FTP drop points.
In addition you can have a script generating spurious emails and web browsing requests all day long so that you quickly overwhelm anyone's ability to actually log anything of substance (if you are really dedicated, you could probably generate 1GB of trash data a day).
Whoever is thinking about these moronic ideas appears to be technically ignorant.
Not that there's anything wrong with it. :-)
I just try to write good comments when/where they will get noticed, so that I have the greatest impact on the greatest # of people, that's all.
Just the opportunity:
Hey all! Has anyone seen that AL QUEDA member lurking around here? I coulda sworn I saw him with one of the few NUCLEAR BOMBS in the world.
... d'oh! You mean they're not monitoring content?? That takes ALL the fun out of it!
--pi
But a Justice Department source said Wednesday that data retention is mentioned in the strategy only as an industry concern -- ISPs and telecom companies oppose the costly idea -- and does not reflect any plan by the department or the White House to push for a U.S. law.
They just have no fucking respect for our rights at all in the DOJ, do they? None whatsoever. I mean, come on - industry concerns?! Sure, industry would have concerns, but have any of these fucknuts heard of liberty and/or privacy?
Send Lady Liberty back to France, it's over. Sell the Declaration of Independence on Ebay, clearly it has no meaning for our appointed officials.
sulli
RTFJ.
I've read the proposal that passed the European Parliament, and if the policy the Bush administration is attempting to put in place is similar, then it won't pass Constitutional muster. It fails on at least three major points:
I don't think they really realize the volume (either the US or Europe) as to what they're requiring, either. A rough estimate is that an email header is 1k, and that a log of an http request is .5k. For an average user, 1000 http requests (remember, each picture/icon is a new request) and 10 emails per day would be typical. That's about 500k per person per day. For a mid-size ISP with 10,000 users, that's 5GB per day, 1.825 TB per year. Even assuming good compression of 90%, that's 180GB per year. Given that you would need to get a good machine and lots of redundancy for it (remember, this is a LEGAL requirement), I can easily see it costing $30k PER YEAR or more for the hardware alone for log space (plus the additional costs to upgrade the routers/mail servers/proxies and other infrastructure to allow for such vast logging in the first place). I'd estimate that it would be at least triple that, when all other factors are included. Even a $30k capital expenditure per year is a pretty good chunk of change for a company with a probable revenue stream of $3M per year. That's a 1% value of gross receipts (conservatively). And what about someone like Earthlink or similar, who has millions of customers? You're looking at requiring Terabyte storage systems costing multi-millions of dollars.
Even though I've seen some really dubious legislation and policies over the past 10 years (e.g. DCMA), I don't think this one will fly.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Blunkett went all uncharacteristically contrite on us, but according to the Register this just means that they're not actually formalising what they are doing anyway.
They probably really are handing around traffic analysis data like smarties. "Oh looook what he's accessing!" Probably there's people out there being blackmailed right now; there's bound to be some bad apples with access to this data.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It was originally designed to help Chinese Internet users get around the Great Firewall Of China.
Looks like the US and EU will be needing it too...[sigh]
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Outright I hate the idea, this is just pre-emptive search/seizure. The gov would only propose this because it's in the digital domain where it's A: feasable, B: deemed by J. Pulic to be a non-issue. The could NEVER get such a thing in to action with physical mailings.
But then I thought.... If every ISP had to monitor port 25, isolate all to and from IPs and email addresses (forged or not), and fill up all those hard drives, tapes and whatnot...
Can you image how fast SPAM would drop off as the ISPs attempted to control the now real costs of hosting spammers?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
.. sell your email address to the asians so that they can spam you to death...
Only 'flamers' flame!
So does this mean that ISP's are going to be forced to pipe ALL port 80 traffic through a proxy, because hey, how else do they get EVERY web page we go to...
Either that or they just keep track of what connections are being made through them to port 80 of places...but then what about web sites simply not on port 80...seems an easy enough way for "terrorists" to avoid being caught.
And then there's the issue of people who run their own mail servers...I'd LOVE to see the government FORCE me to log all my own damned emails. It's not like it's hard to setup your own sendmail box and use that instead of your isps
My parent post here was marked 'Overrated'. I am politely requesting information on what is 'overrated' about it? That kind of implies there's something seriously wrong with my comment, but as of yet I don't see that.
Somebody help? Frankly, I suspect that it was modded down because the person who did it thought I don't value privacy. That's not true at all. I'm just saying I trust a computer to scan my e-mail and retain my privacy, not a human. Once a human reads my email, I get spooked.
The internet is NOT a secure communications medium regardless of what the DOJ wants. So why make yourself stand out to them?
"Derp de derp."
GPG will protect you from email listening (although I guess they just get the headers, so that won't help much.) Too bad SafeWeb isn't around anymore.
I dislike the European plan. But I also recognize it's a different place with very different attitudes of both police and populace. EU member nations are also free _not_ to enact the plan in their countries. I expect that a number, including the UK, will not.
As far as the individual goes email content can be encrypted. But it looks like the government wants the headers of email and web traffic. Therefore I think there are some things that site maintainers can do to make things more secure.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
- 60 of 98 FBI Terrorism Cases were thrown out because of lack of evidence - The article even has a quote from an FBI spokesman admitting to arresting and trying to prosecute people knowing that it would never go through.
- Village Voice Analysis - It's the Village Voice, take it with a grain of salt. (I'm just adding it to this list because it is quite insightful.
- Business Week Article discussing the various infringement of civil rights
- NYTime Editorial on naming an American citizen as an illegal combatant
- Ohio State graduates threatened with expulsion/arrest if they "demonstrate or heckle" during Bush's speech - "But immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university's speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling would be subject to expulsion and arrest. The announcer urged that Bush be greeted with a "thunderous" ovation.
- Federal Courts strike down Bush Administrations attempt to prevent people from challenging censorship laws
- Justice Department raising questions about case on John Lindh
- Another NYTimes article on illegally detaining American Citizens
Also if you think this and the USA/PATRIOT Act is unfair, sign the petition to get it repealed_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
I can just hear them now!
Why is it this group of people all visit one web site? And it's from a Russian domain!
Well, we've looked into it sir - it seems to be a, uhhh, proxy
What the hell is a proxy?
We are on it sir!
Get your Unix fortune now!
OK, let's look at those, shall we?
- 60 of 98 FBI Terrorism Cases were thrown out because of lack of evidence -- isn't the key phrase there `thrown out'? Isn't this, in fact, an example of the system working as it is supposed to?
- Village Voice Analysis [villagevoice.com] - It's the Village Voice, take it with a grain of salt. -- or a lot of salt as the case may be. The Voice is, of course, the premier voice of the Chomsky/Mailer new left. Even though it has mellowed somewhat with old age and new management, it's hardly a voice of journalistic integrity...
- Business Week Article discussing the various infringement of civil rights [businessweek.com] -- the columnist seems completely unaware of many of the details of the case (such as the fact that Muhajir has had a lawyer at every stage of the process), and of the supreme court precedent (Ex Parte Quirin). He does manage to fill in some general paranoia for a lack of knowledge of the case, but that hardly makes good journalism, now does it?
- NYTime Editorial on naming an American citizen as an illegal combatant [nytimes.com] -- more or less the same. But of course, we know the NY Times editorial page's stance on the matter.
- Ohio State graduates threatened with expulsion/arrest if they "demonstrate or heckle" during Bush's speech [yahoo.com] -- expulsion from the event, of course, but that makes rather less exciting a story, now doesn't it. Anyhow, what an unnamed official of a state school has to do with the Bush administration is unclear.
- Federal Courts strike down Bush Administrations attempt to prevent people from challenging censorship laws. -- while I'm a big fan of the RMN, and especially of Dave Kopel, this seems little more than an tendentious headline about what is essentially a contract law dispute, no? At any rate, didn't the court strike down this action, and rule that even though Mr. Stillman had signed a contract not to, he would be allowed to publish?
- Justice Department raising questions about case on John Lindh -- but nothing in this article alleges any lawbreaking, merely that some unnamed officials are alleged to have had not-very-specific `concerns'.
- Another NYTimes article on illegally detaining American Citizens [nytimes.com] -- this is no different from the other Times piece. It's amazing how many pundits are willing to declare something `unconstitutional' without bothering to read the constitutional law precedent which the administration has very clearly pointed to (Ex Parte Quirin).
IOW, there are a lot of tendentious claims here, but little backup for any of them.The problem is the general populus and law makers don't understand what they're saying/hearing. A analogy would help to put things into perspective.
Logging email headers can be compared to the phone company keeping records of your incoming/outgoing phone calls.
Do they do it now? Yes...and most ISPs keep generic logs as it is.
Does the phone company retain ALL the info? No...but they CAN get the info and keep it if you're suspected of doing Bad Things...or they can tap the line. Can an ISP track the same amount of info? Sure...but they don't do it right now unless you're doing Bad Things.
Keeping track of where you go on the web can be compared to driving.
Does your state's dept of transportation keep track of what road you drive, and what time you did it? No.
Does your ISP track what sites you go to and when you go to them? No...unless you have a proxy, in which case they might keep a generic log.
Can the dept of transportation put cameras at all intersections and track your license plate number? Yes...but think of the hideous cost and hideous amount of data. Same goes for an ISP to track where you go.
It's all about perspective...
Lets require that each user of the net record all of his/her activities while on the net with monitoring software installed on thier PCs. And we all know that the good citizens have nothing to hide and will go along with anything Uncle George says.
Now lets see, who should get the contract for that software... why MicroSoft of course, they are into trust worthy computing now a days.
Even if they do this, places like Anonymizer will provide Secure Tunneling. Anonymizer also has other services, and they seem to be trusted for their part.
This can handle most web activity. Email can be encrypted, remailed, or signed up for and used through Secure Tunneling, or a similar method.
As an example, when I browsed the web at work, I used Secure Tunneling. For my email, I used Hushmail. Hushmail encrypted all the data that I saw, so it could not be tracked until it left Hushmail's servers.
NNTP is a problem. There are anonymous NNTP sites. Altopia, a site run by a staunch Libertarian, seems to be pretty reliable. You can even pay rather anonymously. More recently, Teranews has offered privacy, though I don't know of many reports on their trustworthyness.
The problem with NNTP service is you cannot encrypt the actual data stream to the NNTP server itself. Hopefully someone will provide such a service. (At another glance, it looks like the Secure Tunneling package includes "Anonymous Newsgroups". But I am not sure what that means.)
Have you read my journal today?
I can see it now...
Programs that act like web browsers hitting pages at random generating way too much traffic to record.
Increases in junk mail to overload the databases with uh... junk From, To, CC addresses.
I'm sure the Security and Storage industry sectors will be happy.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Has anyone ever considered the effect of boycotting European websites and European goods for as long as they maintain the legislation?
I know it's not very realistic, but hey, it's a start.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
I'm not posting as someone looking from the outside, I'm telling you from the inside that people with access to personal information go snooping through it all the time. Please inform every root user I've ever met about your honor system.
Joe Sixpack either can't understand encrypted email or doesn't care, because the twenty odd encrypted email startups in the Bay Area have all ended up on the scrap heap, and some of them had truly nice, easy to use solutions.
*sigh* ok fair enough, I mean, accepting something as prima facia true w/o looking at the underlying info is, well, something to be avoided. I have to run but if I can get back b4 this discussion closes I'll dig something up for you. Until then 'absolut power corrupts absolutely' applies here and history informs - Look at the FBI/CIA operations from the '50s-late 70s, look what the CIA has done in El Salvadore, in Guatamala, Nicaragua etc. Look at what the fbi did under hoover, against anti-vietnam protesters, and, um, democrats. Now ask yourself if you want these people to be able to get together and have a party in your backyard (you won't be invited, unless you're being indited). Think about it, even if you have 'nothing to hide' that's fine, but just because you control your internal moral ethos by the rules those in power dictate doesn't mean we all do, or that we want to. I don't want to feel that I'm obliged to censor my thoughts, in my own house for christ's sake, in fear that someone may be listening and if these thoughts are out of favor now (or loose favor in the future) they could be called up and used against me by people who, don't forget, have power over me.
For example, if the FBI comes, arrests you, throws you in jail for a month, then you get out (due to lack of evidence (see above)) - did they have to do anything else to destroy you? what happened to your house (who paid your rent/mortgage), what happened to your community respect/standing? what happened to your friends, your sig. other., what happened to your raise, your promotion, your job?
see?
closed minded is as closed minded does
FidoNet reincarnation starts tomorrow.
Works both ways...do you think that a t3rr0rlst would be stupid enough to put the kind of revealing information in their e-mail that will flag Carneyvore, or reveal anything substantive in the logs retained by ISPs? Hasn't it been stated that one of the methods used consisted of common phrases that had secondary meanings to those using them? Who knows what "Let's do a picnic tomorrow" could actually mean? Hell, they could throw someone for an even bigger loop be creating a diversion - one dude's subject might read
Don't you think it'd be all over the news if the Gov't was chasing down false leads?
I mean seriously, who cares if they read our e-mail? What are they going to get from it? They already have my social security #. THey have my date of birth, mother's maiden name, the city I was born in, how much money I've made in my life, where I've lived all my life, who I've worked for, what kind of car I drive, my physical description, and so on. What is going to be revealed in e-mail that they aren't privvy to now? Who cares?
I don't care if some gov't agent is reading my overly-affectionate emails to my GF. I'll never even meet the guy!
Fight corporations when they try to peek into your lives, but don't fight the Gov't. They're out to protect you.
"Derp de derp."
- DOJ wants local garbage men nationwide to store all residential and commercial trash in marked bins for 10 years so the FBI can research an individual's lifestyle
- DOJ wants power companies to keep detailed records of household power usage so the FBI can determine what time of day is best to break in and plant listening devices
- DOJ wants all White House officials to publish full transcripts of their meetings so the public knows just how much of Bush's energy policy was written by Enron
- DOJ wants all ISPs to log and retain all of your email headers and browsing history so the FBI can go through your trash without feeling nauseous.
Which of the above seems reasonable to you, your Honor?If state DMV's can get away with selling driver's license carrier's information, I wouldn't be surprised if the government sells the information, and/or uses it for their own research/census-type mischevious plans..
Unfortunately, that is the case. While the average good cop/fbi agent whatever wouldn't really care about tracking habits, people with grudges and/or in a position to blackmail can certainly abuse it. Its a pity we can't trust anyone, i wish the world wasn't so fucked up.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
There are, as yet, no data retention laws for ISP's in Europe. The UK tried to do this the other day, and got massively slapped down by the public, thereby forcing them to table the issue.
Now THAT's democracy in action.
BTW, doesn't anyone else find the world a scarier place after 9-11? The problem is that it's Bush who is so scary, not Al Quaida...
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
All the gummint needs to do is invest heavily in AI "helper" agents that'll assist you with your browsing, finding the best deals, talking to your friends' agents so they can let you know what your friends are doing, etc. Since they do all this for free, these agents should become very popular. Unca Shuga gets to maintain the database the agents need to perform their help, though, so they can see when disaffected youth are studying bomb design, nazism, etc. and can take appropriate pro-active action. They can also see who refuses to use these incredibly helpful little agents, and thereby focus their non-automated energies on those who obviously have something to hide.
"I can email my mother in complete piracy."
;)
I meant 'privacy' not 'piracy'. Been posting too much about the RIAA lately.
"Derp de derp."
Check this out:
m
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0108/p1s4-usju.ht
Further, Lawrence Tribe (a Constitutional scholar) suggested on last night's Nightline that what the government is doing may very well consitute an unreasonable search (skirting the Fourth Amendment) If the government is out to 'protect' me, who was it 'protecting' during J. Edgar Hoover's reign (COINTELPRO), when the very kinds of abuses that every American should fear, were actually occurring?