Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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
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
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.
... 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
...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
Are liquor company execs usually alcoholics?
Are drug pushers usually drug addicts?
Are people who create child porn usually pedophiles?
Or is it just about profit?
You seem to be saying that you are paranoid of government intrusion, but at the same time, you want to take away the rights of people who haven't been convicted of any crimes.
That is a huge contradiction. Why should pedophiles be the victims of a witch hunt if they have done nothing wrong?
The simple fact is that pedophilia is not a crime. Pedophilia is what you are, not what you do. And you know, rape is often more about power than sex. What makes you think that most people who rape children are really pedophiles? You don't think it could have something to do with the fact that children are easier to keep quiet? Easy targets, for anyone with a twisted mind?
Does being a heterosexual man mean that you go around raping women? Should every heterosexual man have to register somewhere to "help keep predators at bay"?
It seems that you are just one of those "freedom and human rights for all, except if they are something I don't like" people. You are as dangerous to democracy and human rights as any oppressive government. You are the kind that gets these governments into power in the first place.
The bottom line is that if you are a pedophile but not convicted of any crime, there is no reason why you shouldn't have the exact same rights as anyone else. Say otherwise, and you are a hypocrite and a supporter of a Big Brother society where the government can pretty much do as it pleases to keep the people down.
Pedophiles have the exact same rights as everyone else to protect their identities, unless they have been convicted of a crime.
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.