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

Land of the free

[Threni]

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.

Re:Land of the free

[monkeydo]

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.

So use encryption!

[jdavidb]

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.

Re:So use encryption!

[PDXNerd]

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!

Re:So use encryption!

[forgotten_my_nick]

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.

Re:So use encryption!

[GoofyBoy]

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.

Re:So use encryption!

[PFI_Optix]

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.

Re:So use encryption!

[DavidTC]

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.

Re:So use encryption!

[Haxwell]

Two words:

Mixmaster remailer.

China

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Btdd

[broothal]

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.

Get yer encryption here, folks

[chiph]

http://www.pgpi.org/

Privacy

[backslashdot]

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.

Ob Dr.Evil quotes

[dc29A]

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!

Re:I hate to be redundant

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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?"

Use Free Software

[massysett]

http://www.gnupg.org/

Re:Don't worry.

[Catbeller]

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.