Slashdot Mirror
How The Government Spies On Your Internet Use
intnsred writes "In explaining the recent PATRIOT act ACLU lawsuit, a D.C. civil rights lawyer writes, "I am sure that many of you reading this (and I, likely) have the government in our computers....Until now, we did not know much about how the government goes about this procedure. Now we do." Fascinating details of the case and how easy it is for the gov't to get warrantless access to you through your ISP. This clarifies and expands a previous /. article."
Okay, mr. Delta-9, that is uber-paranoid.
This is, of course, why gpg/pgp is such a great idea--an open source encryption method allows you to look for said back-door. Good luck. I don't think you'll find one.
I do use pgp for my email with certain individuals. Does that likely put me on the 'radar'? Maybe, but if we were all using it, then the gov't would have to rely on other indicators to find suspect emails. Personally, I am in favor of a government that doesn't have the right to look at my information without my permission or a court order. Does this cause a loss in the FBI's ability to gather information? Certainly. Am I willing to deal with that? Absolutely.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Doe and the ACLU are asking the court to deem unconstitutional the government's use of National Security Letters (NSLs), which allow FBI agents to demand, with no judicial oversight, personal information about clients of Internet Service Providers.
Have you read the Ken Thompson's classic paper on putting trapdoors into open source systems?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
50% of Americans are stupid enough to ignore the overwhelming evidence of the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam
Care to share this "overwhelming evidence" with us, oh great Anonymous Coward?
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
How soon we forget these two technologies?
Magic Lantern is the government virus that AV makers are told not to detect and remove. It logs keystrokes, steals passwords, monitors internet activity, etc.
Carnivore, or whatever it is called now, is that box the Feds put on almost every major ISP out there to monitor network traffic and forward the info to the Fed database. It uses packet sniffers, and checks for certain key words.
These technologies are still being used to Spy on US citizens, Green Card Holders, Visa holders, etc.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Anyway, in Canada the government can seize your property without any kind of warrant, or even notification. Next. look up the Notwithstanding Clause. Finally, Canada also recently psased "anti-terrorism" laws similar to what you're complaining about.
No, the government cannot seize your property without any kind of warrant, or even notification. The Notwithstanding Clause applies to rights of provinces, not individuals; it allows a province to pass laws that violate the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But before an individual suffers from this a province must first pass the legislation, and then enforce it. This involves warrants and notifications.
Canada has indeed passed "anti-terrorism" laws, but they are not very similar to those in the U.S., and in any case Canada is under considerable diplomatic pressure from America, which believes these laws are insufficiently enforced. (Canada is alleged to be the weak spot in America's defences.)
You've got plenty of liberties in both countries, and pretty incontestably more in the U.S.
"Pretty incontestable"? It would be nice to be so right that other people weren't even allowed to dispute with you; the current administration certainly thinks so. But it does you no credit to express this view in your argument.
Actually, before the 9/11 crisis, I would have agreed with you. It always seemed to me that the American character would never put up with the degree of government interfernce that occurs in Canada. Also, on paper, the constitutional safeguards in the U.S. seem stronger than those in Canada. However, a piece of paper is only as good as it's enforcement, and the agencies charged with this enforcement in America seem reluctant to do so. In Canada, by contrast, the government is treading lightly despite its apparently draconian powers. It turns out that there is no substitute for decency and common sense.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
A few key points:
Al Gore's speech last week touched on some of the issues here and I think he expressed them poignantly. Everyone should see this speech. video or audio.
"President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an "enemy combatant." Those are the magic words. If the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment.
Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then it's almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence - because he can't talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesn't even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government.
How do we feel about that? Is that OK?
Here's another recent change in our civil liberties: Now, if it wants to, the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you - and they don't even have to show probable cause that you've done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they're doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.
Everybody fine with that?
If so, what about this next change?
For America's first 212 years, it used to be that if the police wanted to search your house, they had to be able to convince an independent judge to give them a search warrant and then (with rare exceptions) they had to go bang on your door and yell, "Open up!" Then, if you didn't quickly open up, they could knock the door down. Also, if they seized anything, they had to leave a list explaining what they had taken. That way, if it was all a terrible mistake (as it sometimes is) you could go and get your stuff back.
But that's all changed now. Starting two years ago, federal agents were given broad new statutory authority by the Patriot Act to "sneak and peak" in non-terrorism cases. They can secretly enter your home with no warning - whether you are there or not - and they can wait for months before telling you they were there. And it doesn't have to have any relationship to terrorism whatsoever. It applies to any garden-variety crime. And the new law makes it very easy to get around the need for a traditional warrant - simply by saying that searching your house might have some connection (even a remote one) to the investigation of some agent of a foreign power. Then they can go to another court, a secret court, that more or less has to give them a warrant whenever they ask.
Three weeks ago, in a speech at FBI Headquarters, President Bush went even further and formally proposed that the Attorney General be allowed to authorize subpoenas by administrative order, without the need for a warrant from any court.
What about the right to consult a lawyer if you're arrested? Is that important?
Attorney General Ashcroft has issued regulations authorizing the secret monitoring of attorney-client conversations on his say-so alone; bypassing procedures for obtaining prior judicial review for such monitoring in the rare instances when it was permitted in the past. Now, whoever is in custody has to assume that the government is always listening to c