Slashdot Mirror
Court To Reconsider Decision On ISP Mail Snooping
thpr writes "In June, Slashdot reported that ISPs can read email (according to a decision by the 1st circuit court of appeals). In short, the court felt it was not a violation of U.S. wiretap laws. Last month, the Justice Department asked for the full court to reconsider the decision. C-Net now reports that the court will 'reconsider its June 29 decision'. Arguments are scheduled for Dec 8."
The property owner of the email should be protecting it via encryption or its there for anyone to read.
Laws like the ones are talking about will eventually cause the population to do exactly that but it's not exactly as if the criminals weren't doing that already.
You will be labelled a traitor if you protect yourself and [tinfoil warning] you could eventually be held against your will for crimes against the government for protecting your personal privacy [/tinfoil].
Remember that anyone who encrypts their email obviously has something to hide and doesn't support their government and their own freedom!
ISPs can read mail. It is rather impossible to stop them from being able to read plain text data. It is a matter of if they choose to not do so.
If I placed a confidential document on the street with no protection can I arrest you for reading it?
Allowing Email to be read would help prevent spam and other illegal activities.
If you want to protect your Email you can encrypt it using one of the many available free applications/protocals. Which I recommend you do anyways!
of privacy as phones.
why sould it be that once I use a computer and/or the internet I must see my rights go down the tubes?
Hopefully, this is part of the reason why the Court is reconsidering its decision
If I had a real
The Gov't can read your email if they wish anyhow. This would prohibit private citizens from doing so by closing the loophole that said "if the read it while it's on the mail spooler and NOT right off the wire it's OK". It's a bad loophole, it should be closed and closing it doesnt hurt Homeland Security any. The Gov't is only going to be reading your email if you are a "bad guy" anyway. They are more likley to snoop on your cell phone calls than your email. Of course if you ARE a bad guy and give out your email addy on the cell phone you are in double trouble.
Remember that anyone who encrypts their email obviously has something to hide and doesn't support their government and their own freedom!
There are so many sides to a coin - case in point you brought up a very good flip side.
But lets say that enough people started recognizing that email isn't *gasp* private and, visioning everyone knowing email isn't private; that all email (lets extend it to internet traffic) became encrypted. This ruling only helps the civil libertarian groups on getting the word out to protect the civil liberties at an individual level.
Wonder how the groupthink will justify this.
They wish to consolodate the power of surviellence to themselves, and themselves alone.
That way they can not only snoop on the people, but on the snoopers as well; and all without having to worry about being snooped on.
Pretty slick setup really, if they're allowed to pull it off.
KFG
...using the wire-tapping law seems like trying to fit an oblong peg into a round hole. Close, but no dice.
The solution here is either to encrypt your email or to create a new law specifically forbidding ISPs from reading your email.
I prefer the former method to the latter. Laws forbidding an ISP from reading your email don't protect your email. They can act as a deterrent, but first you have to find out it occured, and then you have to prosecute. And then your email has already been read.
Ashcroft was one of the lead opponents of the movement for key escrow/Clipper chip when he was a Senator. Kerry was one of the lead proponents of it.
Ashcroft had a great pro-privacy record in the Senate; now that he's AG, a different faction pulls his strings.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Or, let's recognize that email is just the 21st century version of paper mail, and should be treated as such. There's no logical reason why mail transmitted electronically should have less protection than mail transmitted by post.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
But you don't own the postal service mailboxes. So in that case, you don't mind if they rip open your envelope (don't worry, they'll tape it back up), to see what's inside? Maybe photocopy it and store it in their records? Share it with a few people?
I can see the utility of "wire tapping" email, but I can also see how people have an expectation of privacy when they send an email. They expect those "To" and "From" fields to mean something.
it is, except that most e-mail is equivalent to a postcard since without opening the envelope it is possible to read... BTW it is legal to read a postcard addressed to someone else, it is illegal to open or even destroy a stamped envelope intended for someone else including your spouse, parents, roommates or children.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
yes, any encryption like rot13 is comparable to an envelope and demonstrates intent. ease of contravention is irrelavent making it "non-trivial" to access should be sufficient.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Imagine if we go the route that many groups want which is to have local and state governments provide their own taxpayer-subsidized WiFi internet access, as is being talked about for Houston. It would be a disaster for civil liberties. It would be so much easier for the government to spy on you under the guise of the law and you'd have no recourse but to pray that private ISPs are still in business in your area, which they very well might not be with a cheap state-sponsored competitor.
There are of course limits that have to be placed on how private your messages are on an ISP's network. I personally have no problem with somebody that the ISP has detected has been systematically, egregiously violating state and federal laws with the ISP's resources getting spied on a bit to cover the ISP's ass. The ISP has a right, if it **happens** to find you systematically violating the law and putting it in any way at risk to see what you are up to. The only alternatives are a world where criminals have complete freedom of movement and the other is where the police actively spy on the public. I happen to like neither, but that's just me.
You also have to wonder why someone who is sending stuff that is so sensitive that they wouldn't want anyone but the recipient seeing it, wouldn't encrypt the message first. If nothing more write a little script that that scrambles the message based on some hack algorithm you come up with and send it via another email account to the recipient. It's not REALLY secure, but it's a little better than nothing.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I'm a sys admin for an ISP for the last eight years. Do I read customers' email? Yes. Every single email that comes into our servers is "read". Not personally - but by scripts and filters.
The real effect (if this is passed) would be that some spammer gets a bounce message from a spam filter, sues a major ISP for "reading his email" and wins, and then ISPs drop spam filtering to keep from getting sued for privacy violations.
Post cards do not have envelopes and so can be unintentionally viewed. An e-mail would require the sysadmin or employee to actually intentionally retrieve it from their system to read it.
What if they read the mail while it is still in the truck? Or at the post office? What if a piece of your mail drops on the sidewalk? Can anyone read it now? The side walk is public property?
Hardly true. The postal service is government run - the laws that make it illegal to read sealed mail are part of the system of trust that allows us to place our private corrospondence in the hands of the government. It is part of the service you purchase when you buy your stamps.
E-Mail is not run by the government. It is run mostly by private industry - though anyone can set up thier own mail server no one can argue that private industry does not own the vast majority of hardware and resources that process and transmit the bulk of email.
So - the question to ask yourselves is - do you believe it is the governments job to legislate how a company or even private individual uses and handles data that is hosted and or transferred through their property?
I don't really have an answer, but I find it a fascinating question.
By all means - encrypt your email if you feel the need, but lets not get the government into the habit of legisating the Internet.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
Yeah, great. How would you feel if this was extended to snail mail? Think it couldn't happen....think again. How soon before the FBI etc. decides that terrorists are communicating by snail mail and seek powers to intercept and read mail from people they *think* could be, might be sending/receiving mail to or from suspected terrorists or terrorist orgnizations.
One day I woke up and saw all my rights had disappeared, that's the day I knew the terrorists had won.
I run a small ISP. 75% of my customer base is dialup.
Quite often DialUpUserA will call and say they can't get their email, nothing is coming in!
Mailbox size? 5megs. This is because BroadbandUserB sent them a funny movie, or pictures off of a digital camera, etc., something that took them 30 seconds to send on DSL/Cable.
So I have to open the mailbox, verify there is a large message. Then I'm asked Who is it from? What is it? What is the subject?
Getting them to delete it through webmail is always a pain, 9 times out of 10 OE is downloading in the background locking their mailbox, so when they can't download or delete it via webmail they STILL call me!
Laws to prohibit ISPs from reading other users email is a good idea, I don't LIKE to do it! I feel like I'm violating someones privacy.
However, the ISPs also need to be protected from DialUpUserB, who would do anything to sue someone and retire claiming that THEY READ MY EMAIL!
ISP tech support often requires the reading of a users email, as long as there is protection built into the laws that let's me still do my job without the worry of being sued, I'm all for it.