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Police Target Free Email
Red Wolf writes "The Australian Federal Police are talking with the major free email providers in the hope of making it easier to trace suspects who use the accounts for crimes like fraud and paedophilia."
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Dammit - what about may fastmail.fm account? They're the best free email service but also Australian.
Paedophilia is not a crime, it just means you wanna fuck little kids; it's not the same as actually doing it.
Seeing as how I read the end of the summary as "...crimes such as fraud and Philadelphia..."
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
I hope they get some austrlian spammers in the process.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
If you get hotmail, you could end up in the .NET and your Passport impounded!
Hotmail - More Useful Eeryday!!
Thanks for the tip.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Just pass the buck: x-originating-ip
- Oisin
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
Ban free email? Can they actually do that? And HOW would they go about doing it? I doubt many of them would shut down if they banned, it's just become free PRIVATE emails, which doesn't help them much. So, any ideas on how they could actually do this? Especially if it's hosted in another country.
I want you to assume that all spelling and grammar errors are intentional. Thank You.
What is the point of something like this?
No, really, didn't they think that the minority who are using the accounts in committing crimes will just move to (foreign) services that are not affected by this. While the legitimate users will be inconvenienced...
Where will I store my spam now?
The coolest voice ever.
I won't say either way if this was an intentional inaccuracy, but nothing in the article suggests that free email providers are in any kind of trouble or even the subject of any investigation.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
From the article:
a hahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaa
"Hotmail figures quite prominently in our investigations not because Microsoft is a bad company but because they have provided a good service that can be used anywhere," he said.
Mwuhaa
Mwuhaha
Mwuhahaha
Mwuhahahaha
Mwuhah
More Useful Everyday.
Real Hot mail.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
It's good to see that someone is taking action into free e-mail services. I think we all know that once you sign up for an account, YOU will be getting enough spam as it is. But I do feel it is important to allow the recovery of important data towards a spammer.
Lets face it, in out time we have all had the free email addy's from these places, i mean i have had (too name but a few)
a rs.com (freaked a few people out)
hotmail.com
yahoo.com
lycos.co.uk
britneyspe
fcuk-me.co.uk
etcetc
how many of the other big name free email providers out there are gleefully handing out any details that you registered (like any were real) and say to the cops
"theres an adress here you might want to check something_horrible@some-email.com" and then the police sit there and track all the emails for a while.
How much worse would this be is you encrypted your emails so it looked really suspicious ?
Are there any really good free web based email clients out there that you can suggest where this thing might not be an issue, what do you use ?????
S
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
I have kids and I am speaking as a dad... I'm as paranoid of government as the next XFiles fan however, there comes a point in society where people should be accountable to others in that society. In the case of child pornograhpy accountability should be pressed in as many directions as possible. Let's face it while as another /.er noted that paedophilia isn't a crime it IS for the most part only paedophiliacs that commit those crimes. Any institutions or services that actively would seek to protect the identities of people that advance an inconceivably horrible agenda should also be liable under law. Kudos to any company that helps keep predators at bay.
It is worth noting that at least HotMail already put the IP address of the client web browser into the mail headers. I had the misfortune to need to trace a mentally ill relative a year or two ago who had gone missing. He had sent email to his parents but the police said that despite the missing person report they could do nothing. Fifteen minutes with Sam Spade and a map of London revealed that two mails were sent from an internet cafe and a public library in North London just a couple of blocks away from the house of someone the family knew.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
I use free email accounts to keep spam away from my regular email addresses. I also like to keep spam away from my physical address. So when I sign up for a free email address, I use a fake physical address. I don't trust these guys with my real email address, why should I hand them my physical address and (cell)phone number to boot?
Likewise, if you have a criminal intent and use a free address to stay anonymous, you won't give your real physical address unless you're really stupid. But then they won't need that info to track you down, as you probably allready posed for a security camera, and left your wallet on the scene of the crime....
I guess this is just yet another reason to switch from plain text e-mails to more secure alternatives.
Well, it seems like yet another of our technological networking freedoms is being quashed by the state. Seriously, why do we need to have another form of communication censored? If these mechanisms such as email and the W3 client/server system weren't a problem back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s, what is the problem with them now? Does anyone genuinely believe that there were somehow through some twist of fate absolutely no paedophilic computer users back when Ritchie and Thompson wrote UNIX in PDP-3 assembler? Why do we need to have HTTP, FTP, P2P, SMTP, LRP and YQP regulated by outside bodies? When did we need to eliminate selfpolicing?
The Internet was founded on the propogation of information as freely as possible. This means that Web surfing, Usenet threads and email messages are all equally valuable and important, and removing free email services would remove the infrastructure of one of the Internet's most fundamental protocols. Though it is true that many free email users are fly-by-night peculiars such as trolls and paedos, we have to understand that they provide a service not unlike those of coin-operated telephone boxes and stamp-operated postal services, and that vigorously spying on free email users is tantamount to removing phone and mail boxes or tapping them.
Besides, keeping an eye on free email services won't reduce the problem. If child pornographers and spammers are determinted to get their messages through, then they can just use encryption, or the Freenet protocol to make them untraceable - or both, in which case nothing can be done. Public key encryption algorithm implementations such as RSA, DES and AES mean that the police would reqire upwards of 75,000 manhours per email message to discover inappropriate content; despite being impossible, this is still a violation of our privacy rights!
In addition to this, by carrying out these actions the police are effectively saying that ISP and other pay email accounts are in some way superior to free email accounts. While they may be superior, there can be no way of saying that an email from someone using AOL is more reputable than one from fastmail.fm or any other ISP/POP3 provider using open source software. Just because an email provider happents to use UNIX/Linux servers doesn't mean that they are necessarily infested with unsavoury characters; in fact, I have received more unwanted email from large ISPs, IAPs and LAPs than from fleeting servers hidden somewhere on Christmas Island.
I could continue, but I think that with more than a cursory notice the other multitudinous incarnadine problems with this new system become clear, and we must make sure that these plans do not become widespread. Fortunately, they are quite impractical, so a few negative anecdotes should encourage most middle managers in service providers and tech support to avoid implementing it.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
But your whole argument of "let's keep predators at bay" and "it's ok because they're gonna hurt my kids" is crap.
Giving up freedoms like that is what leads to a police state which watches over everything you do.
Yes, sometimes accountability is good. But then again, sometimes it's bad. Really Bad. People are idiots when it comes to a lot of things, and you can talk all you want about your supposed freedom of speech, but it's a fact that a lot of highly respected people who spoke their minds after 9/11 GOT FIRED FROM THEIR JOBS because of pressure from the public. Yeah... accountability, great. But when you're dealing with a bunch of bigots and losers that can't have an original thought that wasn't broadcast on CNN, you're in trouble.
What else would you like, a website that holds a registry of every paedophile, even if they haven't committed any crime?
... we have an identity card (IC) which every citizen must have and carry on their person at all times (not doing so constitutes a criminal offense, but the police are pretty lenient about it).
The implication of this is that many large local portals, like Catcha or BlueHyppo have an IC field. Whether or not this is mandatory depends on company policy, but if legislation were introduced to make this mandatory, this would immediately provide an easy method of identification should the need arise.
I suppose an alternative would be to allow relative anonymity, but at a price to deter wanton abuse of the system.
Personally, I am intensely concerned about the importance of privacy but this needs to be balanced against the need for social accountability.
Doin' it tomorrow: paedophiliac.
Big difference, and I don't mean that sarcastically.
The only way you'll be able to run an effective police state is to firewall yourself off from the free world. See here for examples of how to do it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Seems ok to me. When you sign with a non government or for profit organization in order to get a free service you should be aware that you will be getting more than you bargained for.
Caveat Empor.
If you want a more secure form of communication just pay for an E-mail address and encrypt with PGP/GPG.
Of course you can also take it to the next level and compose your E-mails on a machine that is disconnected from the Internet. Encrypt the message with a one time pad cipher before removing the message to a Internet available machine. Once on the Internet machine you send a PGP message to your recipient and agree on a time windows of 1 minute sometime in the future. You then construct a secure FTP over SSH and connect it to the Internet for that 1 minute only, logging all the traffic from and to that machine while it was on-line. You sit and pour over the logs and see that your recipient was in fact the only person that made the ssh connection and that it was not spoofed. You can then destroy the hard-drives of the machines you worked with.
Or you can really be paranoid and ...
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
...register their free courriel accounts to the address
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500
then some real criminals can be apprehended =d
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
"Paedophilia is not a crime, it just means you wanna fuck little kids; it's not the same as actually doing it."
And sometimes not even that. Most 'paedophiles' are entirely capable of having a nonsexual relationship with children, as evidenced by this interview, kindly noded on E2 by SharQ.
> Where will I store my spam now?
If they look at my hotmail account (which I use for sites requiring an email address to access), they'll find that 95% of it is obsessed with sex.
Do you really want police to judge you based on your spam?
Nip the problem in the bud. No need to restrict everyone else's freedoms once we have eliminated the undesired element.
This is just a waste of effort. Virtually all of the free email providers insert the IP address of the sending host in the header. Just follow the white rabbit (IP address) and you will eventually get to the owner.
Any criminal who are serious are going to be a bit more clever - open proxies, fake credit cards, etc to hide their identities. Or just a free email provider in a country that is out of the jurisdiction of the AFP.
Forcing people to pay for email just wont work. People have become used to having free email addresses, and there *will* be ways for people to still get it. Sure, MS may charge, as may yahoo, but many other providers wont.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
...and in that context, it will be all about screening for "drug dealers, pedophiles, and anti-war activists with Muslim-sounding last names"...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
O.k. So you want to stop these bad apples from doing their stuff, so why are they telling us! Surely this publicty will just drive any idiot stupid enough to use free email services underground!
And anyway, I would think that anyone with the ordascity to be involed in such things (hosting child porn) would have ability enough to setup their own free mailserver - again, driving the whole thing further underground.
"Always know what you say, but don't always say what you know"
It's worth noting that there is now one truley anonymous e-mail service, anonymail, which runs off the back of the IIP IRC network. At the moment outgoing mail is limited to replies to incomming mail, but because of the nature of IIP it would be hard to impossible to find out who send what to where.
Payment for the service is by hash cash, a computationally expensive operation you must perform to be able to register, as a way of deterring spammers and other system abuses. In that respect it's better than conventional e-mail at present - no spam to my mailbox yet.
Beep beep.
Hmm, I;d be really interested in how American protections of privacy function on American companies dealing with the Australian government...
They aren't banning free email (as some kneejerking Slashdotters have implied in this article), they just want it traceable.
Email accounts should all be traceable. It should be legislated that some kind of physical address/person identification is required for any form of email access, free or paid for. It's not stopping you from emailing, or censoring you - it's just making you accountable. It's getting to the stage with spam etc. that really we need a licensing system to be allowed to run a MTA. All ISPs by law should be forced to block SMTP traffic except from their registered MXs, and the administrator of the system should have to be licensed, just like a radio operator. Too much spam coming from your MX? Your license gets revoked. Of course, all the whiners who can't configure sendmail to save their life (but run it anyway, usually as an open relay) would be up in arms about such a scheme, but it's about time it's done.
It seems like so many people are taking principles of anonymity to the levels of zealotry (just look at the responses to this article to see what I mean). When anything ends up getting 'religious' it hurts the cause. What do we want? An accountable email system where the police only have to log/record/watch suspects, or an unaccountable email system where they have to watch much more, with the associated 'collateral damage' of ending up watching some non-suspects because you don't know who they are? You just have to look at the real religions (such as Christian fundamentalists) to realise when anything gets religious, it ends up in destruction. How many people have Christian zealots killed? This can translate to "How many potential Linux users have Linux zealots turned off?" or "How many people who care about privacy have been turned off by the rantings of ACLU zealots?"
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
FBI man #1: I think I found another one.
FBI man #2: Who is it this time?
FBI man #1: JohanSBach@freemail.ms -- he claims to be 4 years old and living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
FBI man #2: I think I got one too! GWBushy@mailrus.gov claims to live in the same place!
FBI man #1: You know, when I started this project, I thought it would be a little easier than this.
FBI man #2: I know what you mean...we've gone though 150,000 email accounts so far and have found only 5 accounts that weren't fraudulent.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
You say to not be naive, but you yourself are being naive.
If you give these so called investigators the right to go through someone's email because they're "evil paedophiles" (please read some of the posts on paedophilia regarding this), what's to stop them from abusing this power?
Nothing.
I'm sorry, but that's the truth, once you start letting go of the freedom rope, they start to tug harder.
And by the way, investigators do get hampered, they're bound by rules and regulations. Cops can't just go searching your house without a reason, and what you're suggesting is that you let them search your private conversations without a reason... Does that make sense?
PS The other comments were not flames, nobody's attacking you here, we're merely discussing the points you've put forward.
Appearantly,Cops are stupid,useless pricks no matter where you go or live in the world.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Fortunately for us, he's dramatic- and doesn't read headers. Our other brother was the one who got his terrible goth poem by email, from a free account, and we seem to have narrowly averted disaster- he was out in Arkansas, it turned out, having a breakdown. (The brother who got the email sat down and found out where he sent it from, and checked in with the rest of us to let us know that the kid was alive. We'd called the police and the police were spectacularly unhelpful, we had to call them back and tell them where he was. "How do you know?" they asked us.) If he hadn't been traceable, he might have been dead by the time we got to him.
I have accounts that i use regularly that are free accounts, yes. And I'd resent them being read by strangers (Do we really think that the government are the only ones who want us all to be visible on the map? See my journal entry today on microchip implants in mexico... how long till your email ID is on your chip?) but i was thankful, that once, that anonymous doesn't always mean anonymous. Mixed feelings on this one... i wouldn't want my phone tapped, but i do want 911 to be able to see where i am. There's a differene, but only in degree.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
The issue at hand is the fact that law enforcement (police AND the politicians that support them) are operating from a, "Take away the rights of innocent citizens to catch the criminals" mentality.
While I recognize that my view is American and not Australian, this is not the way to do things. This is the equivelent of arming the police exclusively with grenade launchers and fragmentation grenades.
"We got the criminal, and the 20 innocent victims around him...."
-------------------------
As easy as herding cats!
surely a pedophile if he acutaly goes as far as brakeing the law must have come into physic contact with the victim at some point shouldn't that make a good starting point to finding him and whats to stop someone using one of the many stolen credit cards on the web to get a hotmail acount with most pedophile related cases the suspect is easyly identifyable proveing he acuatly commited the crime is normaly the hard part this law will not help at all its just another case of goverments blameing the internet for an age old problem
Roses are Red Violates are Blue im not very good a poetry but i have many other redeming qualitys
You name it: "There are *phsycopaths* like in the movie with jenifer lopez in the streets. Like all the people want something from their life, the *phsycopaths* want to brutally murder people. You know, I like to play tenis, you like to feed your dog, Bob likes to go into crowded buses. Well, phsycos, like to kill people. They exists, like you and me. And to protect you from them, we will put cameras in every street. We will eavesdrop every communication channel and we will demand chips to be implanted into human bodies. Those goddamn phsycos, they think they can get away with it, do they? And pedofiliacs too. And terrorists. And communists."
If I wasn't paranoid, I would come to believe that "terrorists" and convenient to some...
We already told you on sunday that
french e-mail (aka courriel) should not be renamed free e-mail
-->[]
In this 'brave new world' don't expect to have any rights, unless you are the government. It is all about total control of the populace an the pace is quickening.
Not saying its right, but its today's reality. Until the people ( that's ALL of us ) decide its not going to be tolerated and stop it.
The few of us that are willing to do so, cant do it alone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No running - or writing, or trafficking in - SMTP and POP3 software without a World Government licence, you GNU/lunix using terrorist.
When (if ever) will Plod realise that it's all just IP packets, and that anybody in the world can run any service they want? You want to ban anonymous email? Right, you go ahead and try and find my SMTP server running behind my firewall and accepting SSL encrypted connections from my friends over a non standard port and logging to /dev/null. And at least I know I'm doing that. How are you going to find and stop all the Joe Sixpack trojaned machines running SMTP proxies, all across the globe?
These guys are either breathtakingly ignorant, or are wilfully trolling. Budget time again, huh?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If he had had to show id?
Do you present your dirvers license to everyone you talk to on the street? Or on a pay phone?
Why is this any different?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
RIGHT! The elimination of all innovation that small minded/sighted fools and archaic organizations cannot compete with is surely the only way to reestablish our utopian society. (because we know that child explotation NEVER happened before the internet!). While international boundaries can complicate investigation I find it difficult to believe that it makes it impossible. There is always the question that the case for the investigation is not substancial enough but thats something for another day. Perhaps the solution lies not in the elimination of service but in the responsability of parents to their children.
Free things are bad! Nothing should be free, all you free software users are going to hell and sending the rest of the world to hell with you!
Ok, enough venomous humor. Is it me or does this whole thing sound like something Ashcroft would do/say? I'm truly concerned about protecting children online as well as in the real world, but I don't believe that our technology has surpassed our ability to protect without stripping away our global commons. But I have the IQ of an empty shoebox, so what do I know....
Cracking down on freaks is just the excuse for watching EVERYONE. Making the cops jobs easier and making the next revolution harder. Pedophillia is what a person is. If they cannot control these urges they should be purged from society. (lots of rope and a low fire) DONE! Not slapped on the wrist and sent back out. We cannot cure these predators.
Use hotmail -- go to jail.
Software Wars
Solve the problem, use trusted computing
I've registered as Homer Simpson, with the aforementioned address.
BTW thanks for the zip...I never knew what it was and so just put 90210.
You're using her as bait, Master!
I'm looking at my identity card right now and all it's got is my name, home address (cool, huh?) and date of birth. No mention of ethnicity anywhere. The government is actively promoting a new card now called MyKad that is intended to be used as a one-stop shop for everything, including an ATM card, international passport, drivers licence, etc. etc. I'm not sure if ethnicity is going to be recorded on that, though - I haven't 'upgraded' to it yet as I haven't been in the country for a good few years.
However, many documents do have a field called "Ethnicity" which have to be filled in. I'm thinking of things like examination forms - in fact, one of them has only two options: "Bumiputera" (literally, "prince of the Earth" which includes the Malay and the various natives) and "non-Bumiputera" (everybody else, including both the Chinese and Indian races which collectively constitute 32% of the country's population).
Ethnicity is certainly an important issue in the country since being "Bumiputera" means that you've got the ability to buy property at lower prices, and there are quotas to university entry according to ethnic origin.
The Australian Government has no idea how to handle matters,We as Australians are presented with gifts(Internet)therfore we think that we have the right to control these gifts and know how to opperate them as we imported some US IT professional to teach us.(lots of room for expansion in our local IT professionals Heads)
We have a task force that deals with Nigerian Scams and public complaints in regard to loosing money therfore as the comment says they want premium access to information from anyone and everyone.(make them pay big $$$$ in administration is a great start)
If you are a free e-mail provider please think before you act on behalf or possibly cooperate with Australian loosers,They are very small and many have noidea what a line of HTML is that run our policing/crime system.
In the spam department I have been an Innocent Victum via Hotmail of which I replied to a bulk mail by mistake and had my account terminated without question.
I could go to jail for this if Australia had anything to do with the way things are run.
The latter dose not matter as my spam dose cost many a ISP in being blocked and hence alot of cash however Australians certainly have noidea WHY spams happens or why crime happenes.
Identification to use the Internet is Australias best chance of battling against the whole world and its self to combat computer crime.
We are being banned from certain TV stations which means certain imports so I see no reason as to why they should not start restricting Internet unless you have a passport.
They are just plain dumb.
I contacted my Local Australian Police about thousands of dollars in Illegal software with a full traceout and address and information on how to track this market down as they never even moved from their seat.
The e-mail was opened for 3 secs then deleted.
And who or what gives you those rights?
Here's a little proposition for you to think about: the only rights you truly have are those you are prepared to die defending. Anything else can be taken from you.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I think the AU "problem" is simply a matter of technological ignorance on the part of the police.
Not that I'd be in any hurry to enlighten them, the AU government seems to be establishing the kind of legal framework to legalize actions that will put them in the "worst human rights abuser" category someday.
"People always get the kind of local goverment they deserve"
E.E. "Doc" Smith
Tech Public Policy stuff
The reason free email accounts are so useful is not because of their security but becuase of their anonimity. This isn't about people reading your mail. It is about them not being able to trace who you are even if they read your mail. Obviously this isn't the case with something like hotmail that wants to your entire cv to let you sign up but a service like yahoo is relatively anonymous. Given the vast number of people that demand an e-mail address to do anything (even slashdot) you would not have any privacy at all if you didn't have a free e-mail front account to hide behind and take all the spam.
Of course the real problem is at the protocol level. E-mail wasn't designed with anonimity (or security for that matter) in mind. We really need an entirely new messaging protocol that has been designed to properly handle anonimity and security. Then there would be no need for the questionable anonimity of free accounts.
The only thing that will solve the problem is immediate castration of all males. I can guarantee you, in less than 20 years, that will eliminate paedophilia once and for all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You are primarily responsible for the safety of your own children. Face it--it's an adult world out there. Your job is to protect your children from those things for which you believe they are not prepared.
The rest of us are not responsible for creating a whiffle-society where your children can run around unsupervised and not be hurt.
The conclusion of your argument is untenable. You're going to have a hard time convincing anybody that that the goal of free email providers is to actively
If you have your way, privacy per se would be a crime. When your children grow up, what kind of world will you have them live in? To illustrate your position in your own inflamitory tone: "Sir: Please exit the building with your hands in plain view. Your curtains are blocking the Federal Children's Monitoring Service from seeing into your house. We now suspect you are harboring a paedophile in your basement. We are sending in a squad to search the premises."
Won't you please think of the children?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The only way to defeat pedophilia is to REGISTER KIDS. Oh, no, wait...
Why wasn't this message posted in YRO? - After all, we're talking about adding tracing capabilities and logging to services that are used by billions of people not under any suspicion or investigation of any kind. Why the end of catching a pedophile or two justify going all big brother on all the innocent users?
If that isn't YRO-material, I don't know!
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Who actually sends mail from free accounts? The point is to just have an address. The sort of people I give my free account address to aren't the sort of people I would ever mail. Hell I wouldn't even give them an e-mail address if I didn't have too. The problem is the number of things that require an e-mail address is growing all the time and if you gave out your real e-mail address you would a) not have any privacy and b) be drowning in spam.
The real fix to all this would be a better messaging protocol. E-mail just wasn't designed for anonimity (or security for that matter). A radically different protocol that allowed anonimity, was always encrypted, and preferably fixed the spam problem as well, would be the real anwser.
Hmm... normally I'm staunching pro-privacy. However, situations like what happened to me this morning make me concerned: I received a very realistic, but forged, email purporting to be from Wells Fargo (my bank, and the most popular bank in my region of the US). In actuality (SpamCop helped me analyze the headers), it was being routed through a Korean ISP and contained a ".pif" attachment. I run Linux, so it didn't affect me much. But a not-so-savvy Windows users double-clicking their alleged "Business Account Application" could be in trouble. Until we get people to switch en masse from SMTP and/or to use more sophisticated email clients, this stuff is going to continue.
And yet, on
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
I was preparing to roll out shell access and free email to personal friends on my server.
Let's see those Aussies come 'n get sum. Lazy bums.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
In the U.S. it is stated that we are born with these rights and that they come from God. The government was created to PROTECT our rights. Any government that claims that your rights come from government is a dangerous government (read the U.N. declaration of human rights to see a really bad example).
OK. So who states that? And who defends those rights? Is it:
If you think governments can't revoke those rights, tune in to the discussion currently going on between the UK and the US over prisoners still held at Gitmo, where they've been held without trial and arguably in violation of numerous internationally accepted human rights since the previous war.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
_khl
The trade in child pornography is almost entirely non-commercial and therefore your assertion is incorrect. Most child pornography is traded over newsgroups, IRC, IM, or on egroups, where only in-kind renumeration is required.
Most commercial child pornography websites are actually fronts for police sting operations. I scanned about 15 so-called Russian child porn websites and found that all of them were hosted within the US.
Because the police do not inform the public about their sting operations, it is difficult to make judgements about how lively the commercial child porn trade is. For all we know, 100% of commercial child porn websites are run by the police, or it could be less than that.
I can tell you that it's a recognized fact that during the 1980's, the US Postal Service was the only distributor of child porn in the United States, a state of affairs the US government would like to enjoy again in their game of luring and jailing people.
Philip Jenkin's Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet is about as fair a work on the subject as can be had in these days if you are interested in more information.
_khl
Payment for the service is by hash cash, a computationally expensive operation you must perform to be able to register
Great idea.
Dont give your CPU cycles away to SETI et al, sell them in exchange for internet services like email. The email provider aggregates them and sells them on for real cash.
Wait... someone is doing this already, right?
we are awake, supposedly working and active when the US is going to sleepy land.
Current (Brisbane time)3.07pm 22/7/03
July 22, 05:07:47 UTC
July 22, 01:07:47 AM EDT
July 22, 12:07:47 AM CDT
July 21, 11:07:47 PM MDT
July 21, 10:07:47 PM PDT
July 21, 09:07:47 PM YDT
July 21, 07:07:47 PM AST
and 2.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Enby in Waltham
on the warpath
You think it is okay to have the police go after one group of people because you feel threatened by them. So in doing so, you are willing to contribute to the tide of people who want to abolish their rights.
So in a sense, you are okay with it not because it is personal to you, it isn't. You are okay with it because it ISN'T personal. Because by doing this, you don't think it hurts you.
See it from a flip side.
You have kids and because of columbine, kids are considered threats so the state decides that monitoring all children all the time is the right thing to do. People who don't have children and fear them think this is a great idea. You, however, have children and to you, this IS personal and would hurt you and your children. But other people don't see that because by monitoring you and your children, they believe they are safer for it.
I'm as against the idea of children being sexually molested and raped as the next person. But bringing about a police state isn't the solution and neither is invading the privacy of people.
Having said all of that, I would say that if someone has committed the crime of sexually molesting and assaulting a child, they should pay for their crime. They should recieve treatment and should be monitored for a period(parole) to ensure they do not relapse, after which, they should get little check-up visits from the state. But if they prove themselves to be productive and non-harmful citizens, why shouldn't they have their privacy and why shouldn't they have their right to live a normal life again without people finding out about their past and harassing them and chasing them out of town over and over again?
People who say that is is personal sometimes don't really understand what it means. Especially in this case.
If your child was sexually molested by someone, then it's personal. If your child was killed or murdered, then it's personal. If you or your own were responsible for those acts, then it's personal.
If you have children and nothing has happened and you are just concerned, then it is NOT personal.
You saying it is okay for the state to strip away the rights of citizens; however, makes it personal to everyone. Because if you can take away the rights of someone who committed a crime and has already paid for it, why not strip away the privacy rights of someone who has a medical history? I'm sure their employer feels it is the in personal best interest of his company to know if someone will be expensive to keep on as an employee. I'm sure medical insurance companies would love to know.. since someone like that is not worthwhile to insure.
If I sound like I'm ranting a bit, maybe it's because I'm offended by the idea of: "Kudos to any company that helps keep predators at bay."
That reeks of the kind of thinking behind, "The ends justify the means" and "achieving goals by any means necessary". It is the kind of thinking which leads to a KGB state where people end up stabbing their neighbors in the back.
It is also the kind of thinking which quickly leads to racism. If statistics show "predators" to fall more in one ethnic group, is it then okay to strip away the rights of that group of people? Or perhaps it's just men who need to have their rights taken away since the majority of rapes and sexual assaults are committed by men. Or maybe it's just anyone who is aggressive in nature or anyone who is rude to someone else?
Someone else posted that it's a slippery slope that one slides down. I say it is a sheer cliff face. You don't know what you've done until you've crossed the edge and suddenly you find yourself bereft of your freedoms.
Here's another thought: Your child is still young now, but what about when your child grows older and falls into any one of the categories which you think should be monitored? How personal would it be then? Would you be okay with that? Or would it suddenly not be?
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