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Limited Email Surveillance Approved

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-they-were-all-bad dept.

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.'"

44 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Land of the free by Threni · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hey, you're still kind of free. Well, free-ish. I'm sure your government is doing this for your own good. There couldn't possibly be any other reason.

    1. Re:Land of the free by forgotten_my_nick · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yea innocent people should have nothing to hide!

      http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=2 0323

    2. Re:Land of the free by tibike77 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      One word: Romania.
      And yes, I don't give a rat's behind about "official" privacy policies.

      What you grow accustomed to, during a "totalitarian regime", was to be TOLD your government is good, cares for you, and so on and so forth... while all along KNOWING that if you make a false move you risk your freedom, or even life.
      That certainty of knowledge makes it more than easy to ignore any privacy issues... as you are too paranoid already to even start believing your government will do what they say they do.

      The only difference in a "free" state is that, from time to time, people actually believe the bullshit... and other times, the state gets slapped for not being carefull enough to hide he didn't respect your privacy.

      --
      By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
    3. Re:Land of the free by monkeydo · · Score: 5, Informative

      This article is neither interesting, nor informative. In fact, the summary is very misleading. The application for a pen register requires, "a certification by the applicant that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by that agency." No evidence of wrongdoing, my ass.

      Plus, as the article mentions, it was the intention of Congress to bring these type of "trap and trace" orders for email in line with phone lines when they amended the law more than 4 years ago, so this isn't really news.

      The Supreme Court ruled as early as 1979 that the fourth amendment doesn't require a warrant for a pen register, because you have no expectation of privacy in what phone numbers you call. I can't fathom any reason why federal investigators should have to meet one standard to get a pen register on your phone, and a different standard to get the same information for your email.

      --
      Si vis pacem, para bellum
      The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
    4. Re:Land of the free by jc42 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Heh. Considering the Bush administration's past attempts to attribute terrorism to citizens of Niger, and all the email that most of us get from thereabouts, we can assume that we're all going to be on the list of suspects.

      What? Niger and Nigeria are different countries? Are you sure? Do you think that Bush's people know?

      (Also, I've gotten some amazing offers from correspondents in Spain, and because of the ETA gang, that's considered a terrorist country. ;-)

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    5. Re:Land of the free by LilGuy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Guess what happens when you don't hide your innocent opinions when they clash with the administration?

      Ask Hunter S. Thompson.

      --

      You're nothing; like me.
    6. Re:Land of the free by forgotten_my_nick · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Intresting I got troll for that but I (or rather the cartoon) is making a valid point.

      You have a president that has been hiding various stuff and instigating laws to protect his backside while doing the reverse for the people of the country.

      If he was innocent he would have nothing to hide.

  2. So use encryption! by jdavidb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In my opinion, if you're not already assuming that the contents of your unencrypted email are public to the world, you're fooling yourself. If you want it to be unreadable, encrypt it.

    I think the only permission anybody ought to need in order to eavesdrop on a communication is the owner of the wire. If you're contracting with the owner of the wire for services, and privacy is important to you, make that part of the contract. Or save yourself some effort and money and simply encrypt your communications. It's nearly effortless. It won't cost you anything (money wise) for the software.

    Also, I take exception with the summary that "some surveillance of your email has been permitted." The article says, "the Justice Department asked a federal magistrate judge to approve monitoring of an unnamed person's e-mail correspondents." I sincerely doubt that I am that person or one of his correspondents, unless he is a spammer. I recognize this could affect me in the future because a precedent has been set ... but again, that's easily handled with encryption now, isn't it?

    Complaining about this is tantamount to making love to your wife in your open front doorway and then demanding a law be passed to protect your privacy from your neighbor or the police car driving by. For crying out loud! Isn't some burden on you to secure your own privacy? This is not so far from the DMCA requiring legal protection against breaking "protection mechanisms" that are not effective in the slightest. Why in the world would you trust the government enough to expect them to take responsibility for securing your privacy?

    People seem to be looking for an expensive legislative solution to a technological problem that already has an inexpensive technical solution.

    --
    Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
    1. Re:So use encryption! by PDXNerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, encryption won't help if the only information they want are the headers. Those nifty "TO" and "FROM" fields let them know who you're contacting. An added bonus is they get to see what type of computer you're running. If they are allowed to listen on the SMTP servers, they can catch your password in plain english (unless you're one of the few who are using SSL or some other form of encryption on the passwords.)

      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!

    2. Re:So use encryption! by forgotten_my_nick · · Score: 4, Interesting

      TBH the whole system is pointless. Lets say Joe Terrorist wants to pass a message to another cell.

      Does he fire up his hotmail account and send an email to durkadurka@hotmail.com?

      Of course he doesn't. TBH the easiest way would be to post on a webboard that has a lot of innocent traffic, or on the USENET. Heck even just play an online game (MMORPG) and say something like your looking for +3 Orc slaying knife for two gold pieces.

      This method of scanning email headers doesn't solve the issue. All combatants must realise they are being spied on.

    3. Re:So use encryption! by GoofyBoy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is not about reading your email. Its about finding out who and when you sent an email.

      Encrypt it all you want, they are not interested in what you are sending, and not even the subject, they are interested who you are communicating with and when.

      --
      The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
    4. Re:So use encryption! by PFI_Optix · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I think the only permission anybody ought to need in order to eavesdrop on a communication is the owner of the wire. If you're contracting with the owner of the wire for services, and privacy is important to you, make that part of the contract.

      Let me call the phone company right quick and ask that my DSL contract be amended to express that they will not allow someone to tap the lines. I'm sure they'll get right on that.

      Or save yourself some effort and money and simply encrypt your communications. It's nearly effortless. It won't cost you anything (money wise) for the software.

      Because everyone automatically knows how to encrypt e-mails.

      Also, I take exception with the summary that "some surveillance of your email has been permitted." The article says, "the Justice Department asked a federal magistrate judge to approve monitoring of an unnamed person's e-mail correspondents." I sincerely doubt that I am that person or one of his correspondents, unless he is a spammer. I recognize this could affect me in the future because a precedent has been set ...

      I agree with this. If I'm reading this right, the government is investigating a particular person and is asking for permission to monitor that particular person's e-mail correspondents. It's like tapping the phones of everyone who calls/is called by a mob boss. The precedent creates a slippery slope, but we haven't fallen down every time we've hit one of those.

      Complaining about this is tantamount to making love to your wife in your open front doorway and then demanding a law be passed to protect your privacy from your neighbor or the police car driving by. For crying out loud! Isn't some burden on you to secure your own privacy? This is not so far from the DMCA requiring legal protection against breaking "protection mechanisms" that are not effective in the slightest. Why in the world would you trust the government enough to expect them to take responsibility for securing your privacy?

      No, complaining about this is more like making love to your wife in your bedroom and realizing there's some perv in the bushes outside your window. E-mails are NOT broadcasts, it requires some effort and intrusion to tap someone's e-mail. A girl in a slinky dress is NOT asking to be raped, a house without bars on the windows is NOT asking to be robbed, and unencrypted e-mail is NOT an invitation to intercept and open it. It's smart to lock your car.

      If you leave your car running while you run into to the store and it's gone when you come out, I'll call you a dope for making it so easy, but I'll still call the thief a scumbag for stealing someone's car.

      --
      120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
    5. Re:So use encryption! by DavidTC · · Score: 4, Interesting
      There are actually Usenet groups for posting unlabeled encrypted messages in. People receive messages by merely downloading each article and trying to decrypt it. While you can figure out who is communicating using that method, you can't figure out who they are comunicating with, except it has to be someone else in that group.

      Thanks to spammers, you can buy lists of 'open proxies' that will let you hide your IP and access the person with the owned computer's ISP's usenet server, which you really only need to do when sending messages. Thus rendering any sort of traffic analysis of the group completely useless.

      But the best method of sending data on the internet is hiding it in, say, a GIF. You don't even need to use stenography, you can just take an encrypted binary file, put a GIF header at the start of it, and put it in a 1x1 image link somewhere on a web page between two specific times, and have any receipient 'innocently' surf past your page, and then go get it out of their cache. Bonus points if you manage to write bad HTML so that only one specific browser will go and get the 'image', like IE 4 or Firefox 0.7, although you shouldn't make that obvious or people might get curious. Be sure to put a real image up there the rest of the time, and reset the date back whenever you make changes.

      And you can trivially think of a way to have two people do this to each other so they can talk back and forth. They just each have pages on somewhat related things, and browse a bunch of pages on that topic, always making sure to go past each other's.

      The great thing about this is that the receiving end can defeat a keylogger. Just make sure the 'check the cache for encrypted files' is a program that they won't notice when installing the keylogger, for example a solitaire game, and it pops up the decoded message when you start it between exactly 32 minutes and 37 minutes after adding the image to your cache, or something. Most software keyloggers do not include any sort of screen capturing, because that would require a lot of space, and hardware ones cannot do it at all, or at least not reasonably. (And see Cryptonomicron for how to defeat this, although note the method of communication in that can be logged also.)

      Although obviously if you send messages, a keylogger will catch them. In theory, you could click on the letter via your mouse, but a lot of software keyloggers are including mouse clicks exactly because of that. Although the message can be hidden via moving buttons around and renaming them, that is incredibly annoying for any message over two sentences, and it doesn't hide the fact you were doing something very suspicious, which, if they've bugged your machine, they were already pretty sure of.

      --
      If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
    6. Re:So use encryption! by Haxwell · · Score: 5, Informative

      Two words:

      Mixmaster remailer.

      --
      http://www.haxwell.org
    7. Re:So use encryption! by jdavidb · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Bush came along too early in it's toddler years of wide acceptance. There are too many precedents to be set that a Republican government has no qualms about shifting in their favor. To anyone who'd try to defend Bush or the Republican congress, answer this, what has Bush done to PROTECT privacy as president?

      If you think the blame for this lies solely on Republican shoulders, you're dreaming as much as the people who think that the fact that their emails are difficult to intercept means that nefarious personages will actually refrain from doing so.

      --
      Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
    8. Re:So use encryption! by SchrodingersRoot · · Score: 2, Funny

      Not me! I encrypt all my headers, too!
      .
      .
      .
      The e-mail doesn't really go anywhere. But Boy is it secure!

    9. Re:So use encryption! by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Interesting
      This is not about reading your email. Its about finding out who and when you sent an email.

      Encrypt it all you want, they are not interested in what you are sending, and not even the subject, they are interested who you are communicating with and when.

      You're right, but this is a complete license to conduct fishing expeditions.

      Imagine a situation in which you (A), being a non-terrorist might be obliquely linked to someone who is a suspected-terrorist (B). Such expeditions will allow the following chain of logic:

      "We believe B is a terrorist. A sent an e-mail to B. We now need a to closely investigate A because he is associated with our suspected terrorist B."

      This opens up people for the worst sort of unsubstantiated witch-hunt crap. Think of the worst parts of McCarthy-ism, because suddenly you're on the hook to prove that your association with B has no nefarious activity; merely the suspicion of having contacted someone else who is under suspicion, and your ass is in deep trouble.

      Don't believe it could happen? Do a google search for Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian citizen who was deported to Syria under that godawful 'rendering' program the US has been using. On final balance, it was determined that a foot note in an observation of someone else caused him to be flagged as an associate of a person of interest. On the basis of nothing else, he was arrested, detained, deported, tortured, etc.

      Believe me, this falls very much into the onerous category of things. This will lead to all sorts of atrocities.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    10. Re:So use encryption! by Threni · · Score: 2, Informative

      > To entend the analogy, and answer your question, the situation for the last 30 years has
      > essentially been that RSA have patented front doors and indeed, non transparent walls.

      Wrong.

      1) They patented a certain type of front door, not all of them - you could buy doors from other companies, or make your own. There's a type of door - a `one time door`, which can't be opened by anyone except for you and people you live with, as long as you follow the instructions cafefully.

      2) You've been able to use RSA's front door for free for years now:

      http://www.rsasecurity.com/press_release.asp?doc_i d=261&id=1034

    11. Re:So use encryption! by computational+super · · Score: 2, Funny
      tantamount to making love to your wife in your open front doorway

      Ok - after some time spent researching this phrase, I think I'm able to translate this analogy for my fellow average slashdot readers. What he's trying to say is, it's "tantamount to downloading hentai in your open front doorway."

      --
      Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
  3. China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Everyday I feel more like I'm Chinese....

  4. Btdd by broothal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We have the same law proposed here. It stranded due to the politicians lack of technical knowledge. They think that the To: From: and CC: field actually tells you who sent the email and to whom. It's extremely difficult to tell a non-tech savvy person that these header fields are purely cosmetic.

    1. Re:Btdd by Transcendent · · Score: 3, Informative

      Look up a little about SMTP. You can send e-mails to addresses not contained anywhere in the e-mail header. The sender simply has to put in "RCPT TO: someone@somewhere.something" or even simply the username on the server and it'll get to them, no matter what it says in the To.

      Try it. Telnet to your SMTP server and send an e-mail to yourself:

      EHLO localhost
      MAIL FROM: valid@email.address
      RCPT TO: destination@email.address (or username on the system)
      DATA
      (From, To, Subject, etc would go here)
      Any message
      .
      QUIT

      This will send an e-mail with no To, or Subject in the header (it should contain the From at least). The only restriction you may have is that the SMTP server may do checks on the MAIL FROM or RCPT TO lines, which will restrict the addresses you can send to/from. If it's running AUTH, you may have other troubles too.

    2. Re:Btdd by DavidTC · · Score: 2, Informative
      Right.

      Where an email ends up, and where it gets bounced to, are out of band communication.

      A SMTP converstation looks like this, simplified somewhat and with angle brackets replaced with { and } because I am lazy. client.dom sends C messages and has just connected to server.dom, which sends S messages. (After each response code, the server can send random text, though there are conventions there.)

      S: 220
      C: HELO {client.dom}
      S: 250
      C: MAIL FROM: {user@client.dom}
      S: 250
      C: RCPT TO: {user@server.dom}
      S: 250
      C: DATA
      S: 354
      C: Entire email message, including the headers
      C: .
      S: 250
      C: QUIT
      S: 221

      The mail server then traditionally preprends a Received header, and delivers the mail, or relays it elsewhere, depending. Although there was probably some more stuff in there consisting of SMTP AUTH commands if they're going to relay it somewhere, as open relays are frowned on. And the HELO is usually EHLO instead, which tells the mail server to say what extended commands it supports.

      But you'll note that routing the message is entirely seperate from the headers. You could have the headers consist entirely of 'Haha: ha ha ha ha' and the message would be delivered with just that, and any Received headers that mail servers in between put in there. Sometimes they put in other things, like 'To: undisclosed-recipients:;' and make up a Message-ID and Date, but you can't rely on that information, because mail servers don't touch those headers if you've forged them...they just put in missing-but-required headers.

      Sometimes mail servers do go ahead and put MAIL FROM as 'Return-Path:' and RCPT TO as 'X-Original-To:', or in other headers, and those almost always end up in the Received lines somewhere, but they are not required to do that, and it's non-standard. (Finding out the original MAIL FROM and RCPT TO is something that all us mail admin have had to do at some time or another, and it's sometimes easier to just look at the Received line for the queue ID, and grep the maillog for it.)

      In fact, most mail servers accept messages with no headers at all, even though they are not supposed to. The headers are just marked by a blank line after them, and thus if they get a message with no blank lines, they technically got a message with no body, but they'll put whatever was received in the body, and make up a header instead, which at least will make something show up in the client. (Usually the problem is a crappy client didn't put the blank line in there, so this way other people at least see the message, although with the headers prepended.)

      --
      If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
  5. It just gets dumber. by RoffleTheWaffle · · Score: 2

    This idea is made of crap and stupid. What, are they just trying to scare people into not using e-mail if they're going to blow something up, or do they actually care if someone is sending e-mail from a spoofed site named "rofl.mao"?

  6. Get yer encryption here, folks by chiph · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.pgpi.org/

  7. Don't worry. by khasim · · Score: 2, Informative

    You only lose any Rights you haven't used within the last 90 days.

    Now, you have to prove to the government that you're actually using any Rights you want to hang on to.

    I recommend calling and sending real letters to your CongressCritters.

    1. Re:Don't worry. by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 3, Insightful
      but that right better never be taken away from me.

      Or what? Seriously, what would you do? Sadly, I think you overestimate your ability to protect yourself.

      --
      http://outcampaign.org/
    2. Re:Don't worry. by Catbeller · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are aware that Haliburton recently landed a 347 million dollar contract to build new "emergency detention" facilities in the continental U.S.? They're building prison camps for tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The reason given is "immigration emergencies", or disaster housing.

      I don't know exactly how to pound the point home any harder, but they are preparing for national upheaval. They are building concentration camps, my friend, and if anyone tries rebellion they are going to become permanent residents. You're presenting a false choice, letting rebels live or killing them. They've plans to lock them up en masse. Bush already has defacto power to strip citizenship and human rights away at will; locking protestors or armed rebels into Kellogg Root and Brown maintained mass prison camps wouldn't stonker them at all. In case ya'll haven't noticed, crossing SS designated boundaries around public events (I interpret this as leaving the "1st Amendment Zone") is now a federal felony subjecting the criminal to arrest -- by the Secret Service. As a terrorist, essentially.

      This isn't a new plan, either. Reagan's people had a contingency plan set up to mass arrest and imprison dissenters back in '84. Our boy Oliver North had a huge hand in the plan. It's amazing how the same names keep popping up.

      they have taken on vast unconstitutional powers to capture terrorists. Now, the next step is to redefine "terrorist". They've already designated PETA a terrorist organisation. Peace groups have been infiltrated and monitored since 2001 -- as terrorists, of course. Bush has linked criticism and terrorism already. His posse obviously is following a plan which ends with their party enabled to imprison dissenters without trial, subject to torture at will, or even death. Didja hear Guantanamo has a execution station now?

      You can't get near the President anymore unless you sign a loyalty oath and are vetted by the SS for Republicanism. Show up with a sign or a T-Shirt with something to say and you are out, or under arrest. And despite what you might think,the cops are all on board with the President. I saw what happened in Chicago back in 2003. The cops are hard-core Republicans. Same with the military brass (not so much the rank and file). Someone once refered to the Army as the armed forces of the Republican party.

      In other news, hunger strikes have nearly disappeared at Guantanamo Bay after they've strapped the hunger strike non-people into "feeding chairs", forced food down tubes, and physically prevented the tortured from throwing up the food. Afterwards they locked them into "cold cells" for punishment. I can only assume they're using the cold water hoses in the 50 degree concrete cells again, to get those prisoners nice and hypothermic and quiet.

      I don't feel very ironic anymore. This is very dangerous. they are totally out of control, and there is no mass media that anyone trusts anymore, since news was turned into a "business" instead of a loss leader to keep a broadcast license, to tell us what's happening. We have to read overseas press to find out what's going on in our own country.

    3. Re:Don't worry. by Catbeller · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Every point I made has come out of the news services in the last few weeks. "Michael Moore" didn't tell me this; Halliburton.com told me about the camps, and AP and the newspapers told me the rest. Abu Graib cost 8 million. How many camps are they building with 347 million??

      The feeding chairs were in today's news. The prison officials are quite proud of their accomplishment. They seem to really like tying up naked men. Those men are simply trying to die to leave hell. They are being tortured, every day they are in a cage. We've let thousands free from these camps, uncharged, since they hadn't done anything. Fairly good bet we're hosing down innocent men. We've killed about 32 during their various tortures, didja know? It was in the news. Google is your friend. That's the number the military admits to torturing to death.

      All you have to do is read. But you don't, do ya. Ya get your news from Limbaugh and the new, "culture-changed" CNN, and of course Fox News and the others.

      this isn't "liberalism", this is about morality and truth. It's about not torturing innocent people, about concentration camps being built while CBS and NBC and CNN and Fox don't give a damn.

    4. Re:Don't worry. by 3-State+Bit · · Score: 2, Informative
      Halliburton.com told me about the camps.
      okay. where's the link?
      I was wondering too, so I Googled and got the following link:

      Halliburton - Financial News

      * KBR has been awarded a contract announced by the Department of Homeland Security's United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component. The Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contingency contract is to support ICE facilities and has a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States, or to support the rapid development of new programs.       (Emphasis mine.)

      From:
      http://ir.halliburton.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=67605&p= irol-newsArticle&ID=809356&highlight=

      Notes:
      My Google query was "site:Halliburton.com contract emergency detention".

      In case the Halliburton document is taken down, or if you'd like to see it with the search terms highlighted, see the page in Google's cache.
  8. The 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. by khasim · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.
  9. If you arent doing anything wrong then dont worry? by digitaldc · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Welcome to the land of the 'free' and the home of the surveilled.

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
  10. We are on our way to... by dwayner79 · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.aclu.org/pizza/

    --
    Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
  11. Privacy by backslashdot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Thanks to boring people, world is moving towards a total lack of privacy. The governments want to be in on every piece of human interaction. Not only that, they wish to record it too.

    Soon a day will come ..worldwide .. no place to run style .. if it hasn't already for muslims .. where one can no longer can you be silly on the phone. No longer can you make racially biased or culturally insensitive jokes even among non-racist friends. I hope our body is well toned, for it'll be on camera .. you don't want your friendly monitors laughing at you. You have to worry about everything you say on the phone. You can't ask about the weather even because you'll have to worry about whether it'll be interpreted as meaning something else ("why would you care about weather in some other country"). No longer can you raise your voice to your own child. No longer can you tell little white lies to hold on to some image. On the "bright" side .. you won't be able to cheat on your girlfriend.

    They already want to be in on every financial interaction (sales/income tax). I rather pay a flat amount every year for "my share" of defense costs and be done with it. Are they going to ta happiness too soon? "You exchanged happiness, we want out fair share cause you wouldnt have been able to exchange happiness was it not for us" .. Sorry but I only give to Caesar what belongs to him.

    I value my privacy, and I believe that the fourth amendment makes America a strong nation. The founding fathers of the USA understood that the right to privacy is one of those inalienable human rights endowed by our creator. (if you read the first amendment you will see that that it's a right "ot to be violated", rather than a gift from government. I believe the right to privacy is what keeps a nation free from oppression, tyranny, and pathological dictators. Fuck all the fake patriots who'll sell us otherwise.

  12. It's for a grand jury , so different rules apply by reverendlex · · Score: 2, Informative

    Since it's a Grand Jury investigation, the regular 4th Amendment (search and seizure/probable cause) rules are relaxed. A Grand Jury subpoena only requires that the information obtained isn't a fishing expedition.

    This isn't another spying story- grand juries have had the power to read all of your documents to determine if a crime has been committed for hundreds of years.

  13. Ob Dr.Evil quotes by dc29A · · Score: 4, Funny

    You're semi-free.
    You're quasi-free.
    You're the margarine of free.
    You're the Diet Coke of free.
    Just one calorie, not free enough!

  14. slippery slope into police state 24/7 by Intangion · · Score: 2, Insightful

    whats next? you have to store your files where the government can look at them whenever? you have to live in a plastic box with bars over it and camera survelance on you? concentration camps? thought monitoring? so you can be scrutinized and analyzed and your everythought crossreferenced with everything else to determine if you one day might think of doing something criminal? its going to be like the movie minority report, only worse.

    we are losing our liberties faster than we can blink, life under a microscope is not freedom

  15. Oh no! They're treating e-mail like regular mail! by wiredog · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You know, looking at the address and the return address on the envelope for regular mail doesn't require, iirc, a warrant.

    --

    Best Slashdot Co
  16. Re:I hate to be redundant by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is definitely not "it". The surveillance of every single out-of-country phone call might have been "it". Some of the dozens of things the government has/hasn't gotten in trouble for doing illegally might have been "it". But this is, seriously, nothing.

    You make an important point, but probably not the way you intended.

    There is no "it." There is no one big, dramatic thing the government does that says, "This is the point where we're no longer free." France did not tumble overnight into the Reign of Terror. Russia did not go in a day from Revolution to purges and gulags. Germany did not start building death camps as soon as the swastika flew over the Reichstag. Cuba was as free as any country on Earth the day Castro took power.

    Etc. Tyranny doesn't happen in an instant. It happens steadily, insidiously, and at every point there are people saying, "Oh, this isn't so bad, and it's for our own good ..." It's only at the end of the process that you wake up, look around, and ask, "Where did freedom go?"

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  17. Use Free Software by massysett · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.gnupg.org/

    --
    Penny - plain text accounting
  18. Which is valuable and has precedent by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you accumulate information about who talks to whom, when, how often, and whether they get replies, you are doing "Traffic Analysis"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_ana lysis) and getting valuable intelligence.

    Wiretapping law has distinguished between content and header-like information for a long time. Before Skype, even back before email, people used to communicate using devices called "telephones" which set up point-to-point voice grade audio streams. Police would sometimes record, not the actual audio, but just the addressing information that showed who communicated with whom. The laws about wiretapping made it easier to get permission to record traffic patterns than to record conversations.

  19. No such thing as "Land of the free" by ehiris · · Score: 2, Informative

    We're not even free-ish. The boundaries of control are just closing in on us. People in power always fight against individual freedoms because that's what maintains their influence.

  20. Re:Why oh why is it not built into email clients?! by ch-chuck · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Perhaps GnuPG? Well, there's the whole problem with the GPL (esp. V3).

    How about S/MIME ? I'm just playing around with it, but Evolution email has
    support for PGP and S/MIME. I just got a free cert from Thawte installed
    in Firefox, exported and loaded it into Evolution and can now sign/encrypt email
    and just recently send a signed email to Eudora which recognized it as a valid
    signature.

    --
    try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
  21. Re:Time for old tricks... by narcolepticjim · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Don't you think they'll just adapt by sipping the data from the nearest point to you? What good is driving furtively, turning a random direction every three blocks if they saw you get in your car?