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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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Seeing as how I read the end of the summary as "...crimes such as fraud and Philadelphia..."
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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...
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....
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.
When it comes to such things as privacy, freedom of speech, and so on, all bets are off and you are at the whim of the government. Traditionally, Australian governments have respected such things, but the current government, in the name of anti-terror, is steamrolling tradition.
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.
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
When has the fact that something has legitamate uses stop the authorities/companies from making it illegal.
ie: DeCSS
Lock picks / slimjims (is that one or two words?)
Guns
Knives
Crossbows (They ARE illegal in Australia excl Victoria)
I once knew a guy at my school who had his head bashed in with a hammer. Maybe we will have to go back to hitting nails with rocks (nope, they should be banned too because they can kill).
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
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.
Just like beeing an alcholic doesn't mean you're a drunk. If someone live out their alcoholism, s/he will become a drunk - if someone live out their paedofiliact tendencies, s/he will become a childmolester.
Please do not interprent the avbove statement as as defence for paedofiliacs. I find the idea sick and twisted - but I aslo belive that like beeing homosexual, some people just can't control what they are turned on by. Controlling their urges on the other hand, is something all grown-ups should and could be capable of.
Beeing a peadofile is a bit like beeing an alcoholic. If you got it, you have a problem you must work with to overcome.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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.
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.
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...."
-------------------------
As easy as herding cats!
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.
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....
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 yet, on
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.