Limited Email Surveillance Approved

MrNougat writes "CNet reports that some surveillance of your email has been permitted by U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan in Washington, D.C., without first requiring any evidence of wrongdoing. Curiously: 'instead of asking to eavesdrop on the contents of the e-mail messages, which would require some evidence of wrongdoing, prosecutors [of the US Justice Dept.] instead requested the identities of the correspondents. Also included in the request was header information like date and time and Internet address--but not subject lines.'"

Comments

Re:The 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.

[MarkusQ]

Encryption will block them knowing the dirty joke you just told your friends, but it won't stop them from knowing WHO your friends are!

So, you sent and email to Mr. A.

Who sends email to Mr. B.

Who sends email to Mrs. C.

Yeah, you see where this is going. Just about anyone can be connected to anyone else with enough hops.

And the government would be "justified" in collecting the information on each of the people in those hops because those people are "connected" to someone under investigation.

It's potentially even worse than that. Say you get an e-mail about mortgage rates so low that it will make your penis size double while you earn a college degree from Canada (including videos of the dorm life you are missing).

So do 50 million other people, one of whom is a terrorist suspect. Hmmm, must be a coded activation message sent out to all the sleeper cells (note the funny way they spell "farmasuiticals"). So you are all suspects now.

Welcome to the slippery slope to hell. Watch your step, it's paved with "good intentions" and we wouldn't want anyone to slip up, now would we?

--MarkusQ