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Police Target Free Email

Posted by Hemos on from the tracking-people-down dept.

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."

4 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. They'll just move by in7ane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  2. More Accurate Headline? by goldspider · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Wouldn't a more accurate headline be something like "Police Target USERS OF Free Email"?

    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
  3. The price you pay for getting something free by lateralus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. Re:Now it's personal by tybalt44 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    People that are under investigation do not have the same rights as those that are not under investigation. You seem to have the same all-or-nothing problem that seems to be so prominent. For instance. If you have your car stolen by your argument police would NOT have the investigative power to go into the chop shop with a warrant because of the locked door. People do lose some of their rights when there is sufficent reason for the police to suspect you.

    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.