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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.
... 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.
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.