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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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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
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.
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.
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.