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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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Just pass the buck: x-originating-ip
- Oisin
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
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...
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
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 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".
... 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.
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
Just like arresting drug addicts in no way helps stop drug abuse, arresting pedophiles or even monitoring them because you expect them to fuck some child is just stupid.
Like with drugs, the motivation behind child pornography is profit. To stop child pornography, you have to find the people who profit from them. And just like the ones who profit from drug abuse aren't really drug addicts themselves, don't automatically assume that those who profit from child pornography are actually pedophiles.
Clever signature text goes here.
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
The article in question is discussing letting the police read your email and abolishing anonyminity. You're standing on the slippery slope, so yeah, you implied it.
No, he didn't, and no, the article doesn't. The article discusses making it easier for the police to track down suspected criminals. That's all. Not monitoring your e-mail constantly, just extracting whatever information they can about a suspect without jumping through miles of red tape. Whether these tactics will actually be useful is beside the point of your comment.
The parent didn't imply letting police into your home. This is like someone saying "I support metal detectors at the airport", and you replying "Oh, so you want the police to do a full cavity search every time you step into a public place?" He's asking for some level of accountability, and I agree. I'm sure there are *some* criminals dumb enough to make it possible to track them through free email services.
I'm as big a privacy advocate as the next regular (Slashdot) guy, but there's a point where concessions have to be made to let police do their jobs. This is a relatively minor one IMO.
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.
Why don't you show who that "he" is?
Former NCA member Greg Melick told the committee there was an easy way to eliminate the anonymity that protected criminals online.
"Do away with free internet (email) accounts," he said. "If they aren't free then people will pay by credit card and that gives law enforcement some starting point.
The key word here is former. His comments and opinions are irrelevant.
Note: if you want to assume that there are obviously others in the NCA who share his ideas, you can just as easily assume he got fired because he has such outlandish ideas. We don't know, he doesn't work there, so it doesn't matter. They might as well have put quote from Ashcroft in there about TIA.
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...."
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As easy as herding cats!
No, I'm sorry, this isn't correct. No one loses their rights when they are under investigation; believing that they do is the first step towards acknowledging that "rights" are something that governments give you, a privilege that can be taken away. That's what governments want you to think; and it's exactly backwards.
Your rights are INALIENABLE, you *always* have your rights, no matter what actions the government might take to quash them. They are yours as a member of the polity, or as a member of the human race.
Why, then, can the government break down the doors of those who are suspected of a crime, or arrest someone on probable cause, or imprison them if found guilty? The reason is not that your rights disappear, but because we allow that in certain circumstances, your rights are trumped by the need for a government to police us and maintain public order, functions that we the people entrust to them, and which they have at OUR pleasure. That's it... the *only* reason that rights are superseded (not "lost", or even "suspended") is the presence of a greater potential harm to society than the temporary superseding of your rights would be.
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....
So... given that the numbers pretty much speak for themselves, how can you NOT agree that if anyone is to be "tracked" or otherwise given "special treatment" in these cases it should NOT be parents of girls? I mean, if you are going to single anyone out, who better than those who have access to, and power in the lives of, the most frequent victims?
The local TV station ran a fearmongering "special report" on the evening news outlining all the "dangers children face." They had policemen hang out at playgrounds and filmed them coaxing young girls into a minivan while their terrified mothers looked on. They talked about the "online predators" that will lure your children into real life meetings and then kill them. They talked about all these terrible fates that await any child not held under it's mother's wing 24 hours a day - in short, they talked about all sorts of terrible fates that, according to the FBI's own numbers, only a tiny number of children meet with each year.
Of course, what they didn't mention - and what is rarely mentioned in typical propoganda like this - is the fact that tens of thousands of children are molested each year by their own parents, or by a relative, or by a "friend" close to the family (teacher, coach, counselor, babysitter, etc). There is no "typical" when it comes to people who fuck children, and those rapists hanging about in the bushes represent a tiny, tiny sliver of the greater problem. Psychological studies have also revealed that at least (or as much as) a third of the adults convicted of molesting children are not pedophiles, but simply sexual opportunists.
Consider the most violent extreme in this example: of the 2100 children killed in 1997, 40% of the killers identified were family members, 45% by someone known to the child - and a whopping 15% (slightly over 300) were killed by strangers. No, talking about the realities wouldn't do well at all because it would only make everyone much more aware that it's not "those people" doing these crimes, it's anyone you know and there's little way to tell until it's too late. Is your next door neighbor fucking his eight year old? How do you know? The trajic fact is that this witch hunt mentality does nothing at all to protect children and, in fact, only helps blind society at large to the truth; while "concerned parents" (sheep brainwashed by the evening news) go on worrying about the evil "pedophile" lurking in the bushes no one believes Mr. Johnson, the special ed. teacher next door would be fucking his little girl - he's just "not that type."