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Judge Orders Deleted Emails Turned Over
Anonymous Coward writes "In a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, a subpoena sent to Google orders the turnover of the complete contents of a Gmail account, including deleted e-mail messages. The Judge has granted the subpoena and orders that all e-mail messages, including deleted messages, be divulged. Google's privacy policy says deleted e-mail messages 'may remain in our offline backup systems' in perpetuity. It does not guarantee that backups are ever deleted. So much for the Delete Forever button."
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
oh, really?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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I TOLD YOU SO.
I've maintained before that Google retains far too much information to make the use of Gmail anything less than a full-blown privacy nightmare. (For more information, please look here and here.)
And now, the chickens have come home to roost. From TFA: A stunning victory for the Establishment and a horror show for private citizens everywhere. Welcome to 1984.
And before you start, please don't object that the person affected is a defendant in a criminal proceeding, because that's quite beside the point. The point is that Google has this information on you, and will hand it over upon request. This vindicates the caterwauling of all the privacy advocates concerning Google and Gmail, and establishes a dangerous legal precedent. Remember, as our 'inalienable' rights are systematically stripped away by the architects of the New World Order, more and more of the things you do become 'illegal'...and subject to criminal persecution...er...prosecution. It might not be long before you are being referred to as 'defendant'...what will you think of your Gmail account then?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
1. Stop using the web interface and enable POP
2. Start using a client and your favourite encryption software
All email messages exist in perpetuity. They can be stored as backups in any server that they touch between the sender & the receiver.
If you're concerned about the contents of your emails being divulged - USE (open/gnu/etc...)PGP!
If that is still too insecure for you, meet the recipient in the middle of the park for a strolling conversation; and don't forget the white noise generator.
...it makes much more sense to run your own mail server. That's what I do. I don't trust ANYONE but myself with my mail.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
With everything that's been going on lately, it sounds like the American government really wants to take Google down in the war of public opinion. The gov't just keeps trying to make them look worse and worse. And since the American courts typically just allow the gov't to do whatever it wants, they're winning.
Hey, I happen to know YOUR company does backups! You deleted your mail from the server, but you didn't hunt down those tapes in the vault, did you? Huh?
Does NO ONE remember Ollie North and the White House PROFS system? 20 years later, and people still think incriminating data will always just go away when you desire.
INFORMATION WANTS TO BE COPIED.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Might Google be under some sort of secret agreement with the gov't to hold on to emails, just for circumstances like these? It really doesn't make much sense from a storage perspective to keep around tons of deleted emails. If I were Google, the Delete Forever button would clear any deleted email off of my very crowded storage systems at the same time that it clears it out of a user's inbox.
Time to cancel some webmail accounts. I'm sure Yahoo and/or MSN (which I quit using long ago) will do this too.
:)
I doubt I can set up my own MTA...any good howto's out there, or should I *urp* google it?
Someone think of the poor people that will have to read through all the spam that goes through one mailbox!!!
... I can picture the defense getting a 80GB archive tape and being told that was all messages recieved. Yes, 99.999% of them are spam. Enjoy.
Heck
Talk about burying the opposition in paperwork.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
If you don't want other people to read your mail, encrypt it. They can subpoena your mail all they want, but without the private keys they won't be able to read it.
Hey buddy, Here's that kiddy porn you wanted. -Anonymous
BadAnalogyGuy, is that you?
This guy's the limit!
Google: The gmail documents may remain present in our offline backup system. ... with a torch.
IRS: I eventually had to go down to the cellar...
Google: That's the offline backup system's machine room.
IRS:
Google: Ah, the lights had probably gone.
IRS: So had the stairs.
Google: But you found the tape, didn't you?
IRS: Yes. It was backed up on paper tape stored in the bottom of a locked drawer beneath a PC04/PC05 tape reader with a dot-matrix printed sign on the door saying 'ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS.' Ever thought of going into search technology?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let's hope that the U.S. Government never goes after Strongbad, or he could be in trouble.
... but still retain every email server-side.
Remember, Google unabashadly says it wants to index the world's knowlege. Your emails, personal or not is part of that knowlege...
I gaurantee 100% of other email systems keep you 'deleted' emails in backups.,
100%, why?
Because it would time effort when you delete an email togo back and remove it from backups.
Just because google is the only one who drew light to this matter, doesn't mean that they are:
The first
The only
But the comments on here give me the impression that you guys think otherwise.
Does your own backup handle emails intelligently? Does it know not to backup deleted emails? (I am not saying it is impossible for mail server backups may do on account of space, who knows). But that is deleted emails.
What about will have soon to have been deleted emails? (red dwarf on temporal paradox)
You can go back and fetch that magnetic tape all over again, so wipe that smug 'my backup doesn't touch the trach folder' smile of your face you overweight fucking IT tech.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Considering my first meeting today was regarding how best to redesign the mail system to make it easier to comply withsubpoenas in the future. Step one of that redesign: turn off the backups!
Just more proof that the 'e' in email doesn't stand for 'electronic', it's 'evidence'.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
It's worth noting that this fight isn't over yet. The defendant has lost his motion to squash the subpoena based on a privileged communications argument. That's really not surprising... the argument is tantamount to saying "I receive letters from my lawyer in the mail, so you can't have any of my mail." It's just not gonna fly in our civil justice system which has very liberal rules of discovery.
However, based on the article Google has not yet had the opportunity to respond to the subpoena. The third party can always move to squash, and that's where things will get interesting. Will Google be able to convince the court that certain messages are deleted and thus not retrievable. Or, perhaps, that the defendant believed he was deleting the messages and thus deserves to have the messages kept under lock?
These are questions only Google, as the third party, can raise. Now that the judge has issued the subpoena, Google is in a position to actually make those motions. And, if my legal education is worth anything, my money says Google/defendant will appeal if they lose because it's such a new area of the law that an Appeals Court really ought to announce a legal precedence.
Only 120 characters... who can summarize their entire world understanding in 120 characters?!
1. Buy stamps, envelopes & paper
2. Use the Postal Service
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Yippee? SO they're asking for older backups from Google (as much as they have) in order too look at e-mail that may have been deleted in some sort of scramble before the order was in place. So what? Guess what? They order a history of transactions from your bank; They order a history of credit card purchases; They order a list of telephone calls from your telephone carrier; They order a list history from your ISP or employer.
So what? They're asking for a bit of a backlog. This is no surprise
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
The moral of this story is to never write down anything you don't want copied or seen by other eyes. I mean, look at the ancient Egyptians. We are reading their words today and they are hidden in booby-trapped tombs!
As others have pointed out above and below, what happens when Google runs a standard backup program _before_ you've deleted your email? It ends up on a tape, and that tape ends up in a fire-proof vault somewhere. Pushing the "delete" button does not cause that email on that tape in that vault to suddenly self-destruct.
Sure, it could take a lot of time, but under a subpoena, Google may be forced to go through all of their archive tapes and grab every piece of data from every time period they have recorded.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Giving someone access to *cough*"deleted" mail is no worse than giving them access to mail in the first place.
If you want to argue about something, say that they have no right to go digging through someone's mail looking for maybes.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
This isn't a suprise. What Google's policy says is simple and obvious: "We make backups of our systems. That includes data files like your mailbox. We archive the backups on a rotating schedule that you don't know, so don't go assuming you know when any particular day's backup will be wiped. And we don't go back and alter those backups when you modify your data, so don't assume that deleting something today makes it disappear from all backups back to the beginning of time (or the inception of our service).". This subpoena is no different from a standard subpoena to a company asking for all documents including archived copies. If you wrote a memo, it got archived and then later you decided to shred your copies of the memo, the archived copies still have to be turned over in response to the subpoena. And note that GMail's not special in this regard. If you recieve your e-mail through your ISP and use their POP3/IMAP server to get it, it's probably backed up the same way and subject to the same risk of being subpoena'd
First rule: if you want control over your data and when it's destroyed, you must never allow it onto systems which you don't control.
And the very things one deletes can be quite telling, as well.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
I was rather concerned with how the speaker on the BBC special about Google stepped around the question about retained search history from users by identifyable means (They didn't say what it was, and I'm not very familiar with web technology, so might be IP or MAC (maybe not), Idk). Emails are one thing, but I think most have googled something they are ashamed of or wouldn't want others knowing about. Yes, they know you searched for "ultra-midgest-fetsh" last night, and may use it in the future against you.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
There's now more spam than legitamate email in the world, right? And we're all using spam filters, yes? Why not forward all your spam to a gmail account. If enough of us do it, google will see such a drop in SNR that there won't be any point storing all those old emails. What's that you say? Still not enough data to fill the mighty google? Set your random number generator to stun...
Every intelligent organization saw the writing on the way years ago, and went to a 1-week backup recycling policy. That is, backups are only kept for a week, after which the media is reused for a newer backup. All staff is fully aware that if they need something from backup that they inadvertantly deleted, they have less than a week to put through the restore request.
That will, of course, prevent future historians of your organization from using those old backup archives to help develop an organizational history. It will also prevent your organization from data-mining those archives (which is why Google kept them; so much for "don't be evil").
But, and this is important, it also stops these subpoenas. You can't turn over data that you don't have.
The thing is that you have to have this policy in place before you run into any legal issues. You can't decide that you're not going to keep backups after you've been sued or otherwise have reason to believe that you'll be subpoenaed.
You have to put this policy in place, and then you have to adhere to it strictly. You can't decide to keep some backups and not others; because then if you get accused of criminal activity then any destroyed data will be seen as being discretionary and part of a cover-up. Put another way, you can only destroy data as part of routine mandatory policy, and not because you don't like that data.
And, of course, if you do get sued/subpoenaed, then you have to retain the data related to the matter from that point.
Does anybody use voice mail provided to them from their cell phone or landline phone provider?
Where is that data stored?
Has any telco been ordered by a court to turn over that voice data?
Just curious...
Look folks.. Privacy simply does not exist. You'll get your search terms read, email copied, if you encrypt you have to give over the keys and if you don't then you get put into prison anyway.
Your phone will be tapped, mobile will be tracked, cars followed with "traffic enforcement cameras". Your DNA will be on file, biometrics saved and your Underground trips logged.
Everywhere you go there are CCTV cameras, face recognition. Your purchases are tracked with credit cards, store loyalty cards and RFID tags. Your bank transactions are flagged if they look interesting and the tax people peer into your account looking for money that suddenly appears.
1984 got here, oh, 22 years ago now...
Sure, maybe this time they're trying to protect you (though it seems it's actually more of a tax dispute). The possibility of abuse is huge and scary.
It might be that reading deleted emails, or wiretapping American citizens, or planting infiltrators in protest groups, will save some lives. You know what? Too bad. We hear all the time how "freedom has costs" and we honor "the greatest generation" and the current military for being willing to risk their lives for freedom. Here's the kicker: If you live in a free society, you must tolerate risks in the name of freedom too.
There's a chance unbridled surveillance will prevent a terrorist attack. There's a much higher chance that unbridled surveillance will destroy the Republic as we know it. I am for preserving the liberties that make the nation worth living in.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Working for an ISP, I have to point out that we have better things to spend money on than a tech sitting at our email server making backups all day every day. Our mail server currently handles around 10,000 customers and if we were going to back it up, even once, we'd need to corner the market on backup tape casettes. And that's not even pointing out that it'd be near impossible to restore.
I like (HOPE) that we're a normal ISP in this reguard.
next we will all be saying that it is alright that the gov't has our phone lines all tapped, just on the off chance a terrorist might call us and ask for help. why don't we all just back up all of our data online, let them read it all, and find the horrible people then.
now for me, If you live in a free society, you must tolerate risks in the name of freedom too. this sounds more reasonable. forget the injustices we "must" suffer to remain safe, and start taking a few more risks to ensure that we remain free. otherwise our government becomes no better than the old soviet government or the governmtner that orwell created in 1984 with big brother watching over us.
"{09f911029d74e35b/==\d84156c5635688c0}"
Most organizations should routinely purge back-ups of mailbox (i.e., IMAP, POP) servers precisely to avoid this type of situation.
It's no good to wait until a subpoena is served. At that point, you simply have to wait and allow the legal process to play itself out -- all the way out. Even if you prevail at the trial level, you have to squirrel away your back-ups for years because if you destroy them before the requesting party has exhausted all its opportunities for appeal, the organization and possibly its officers are liable to be held in contempt of court. (This discussion is confined to U.S. law; I don't know about other jurisdictions.)
Even if you don't care about confidentiality, this makes economic sense. Wholly aside from the privacy issue, responding to subpoenas for email back-ups can involve enormous expense in staff and machine time, and while some judges will consider claims by the responding party that the cost of retrieval exceeds the probative value of the backed-up messages in the "offer of proof" by the requesting party (describing what the messages are expected to contain), more often than not that argument doesn't work.
You can waste a lot of money to collect individual messages from back-up media, only to discover they have no effect on the outcome of the legal proceeding. I've seen it happen.
Since mass storage is inexpensive these days, and since the majority of messages have a short shelf-life, the sensible thing to do is to give mail users the ability to store as many messages as they want permenently in server-based mail folders, which means they will be picked up by even a very recent back-up, encourage them to get rid of any messages they don't need (perhaps by purging old messages from their INBOX folder automagically), and eradicate your back-up media on a regular basis -- keeping only what you need to restore the message store on your server(s) in the event of a catastrophic failure.
(By the way, this militates in favor of organizations other, perhaps, than ISPs using IMAP rather that POP. You really don't want to have to go around trying to retrieve messages stored on thousands of desktops and laptops in response to a subpoena.)
Needless to say, deleted messages should either not be backed up at all, or should should only be stored on daily incrementals for at most a few days.
Google warns that "delete forever" does not mean that the message is necessarily gone. Their offline backup servers may contain copies of your messages in perpetuity. Can you think of why this might be?
Because I can. Like any responsible data company, they don't want you to lose important data... so they back it up.
Google isn't being exactly 100% altruistic. They are a corporation, so if you want to determine their motivation for any particular thing, look at what motivates all corporations: money.
They keep a massive amount of data, and not particularly because they are concerned about your data recovery needs, but because the massive amount of data that they can collect and associate with you allows them to better design targeted marketing (ads) directly to you.
Based on the emails that you send and the emails that you receive, they can determine if you are more likely to be interested in this service or that product. They can shoot advertisements at you like a sniper rifle, as opposed to birdshot.
Keeping all that data indefinitely allows them to constantly index and profile you for advertising purposes. It allows them to make money.
On the flip side of that, people are more likely to trust Google with that profitable data if Google fights tooth and nail to ensure the privacy of users, so barring severe punishment from the government, it makes sense for Google to safeguard users' data from the prying eyes of Big Brother.
No, that's the death of America!
It's beyond me how not anyone could have flagged your post as "insightful". I object most strongly to the entire sentiment of your post.
To put things into perspective: I'm not at all worried about this particular case. I know that whatever I send over the Internet can and probably will be snooped by Echelon, and even without that, the Internet is simply not a safe medium for confidential data. Nor am I suprised that not all data is necessarily instantly destroyed. Nor that Google is involved. The bigger the target, the more likely the attack.
What concerns me is your sheep-like blind faith in your corrupt and evil government, combined with your attitude of "if I give up some of my freedoms, this will enable my government to protect me better." You and countless ill-informed dimwits like yourself are the supportive base of a massive, concerted, very deliberate attack on the American Way, the American Constitution and the ideals on which the country was founded. Many good men died for your right not to be micro-managed by an intrusive and abusive government, and your mindless surrender of this right invalidates their lifetime heartblood.
I'll try to calm down briefly to explain better why I am ranting at you. Here are some things that need to be considered:
First off, the actual threat to your life and safety from terrorism is negligible. Acts of terrorism usually kill a few dozen to maybe a few hundred people. 9/11 was an outstanding exception that will hopefully be the high water mark for one or more decades. Yes, it sucks to be one of the 3500 people killed in NY, but please consider that:
On the other hand, there is strong evidence that US lawmakers do not have your interests at heart:
IMHO, these happenings all share a common aspect: There is money involved, lots of it, and it is likely that lawmakers are letting their decisions be swayed by the prospect of part of it finding its way into their pockets.
Your corrupt government is relentlessly extending its own powers to act against its citizens as it pleases, and using terrorism as an excuse. Much of the newly-acquired power is being used to support wealthy industries, not honest citizens. THIS is the real danger, and you are in support of it. I cannot begin to express how strongly I loathe your stupidity.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Turining your point around, since when does email exist in a different universe than any other kind of mail?
If I shred my personal mail by running it through a shredder, it's gone. Why is it that if I "delete forever" my email, it's not gone?
Personally, I think it was a mistake on the part of the computer designers to allow things to be undeleted. The courts are just taking advantage of this flaw to uncover evidence they normally wouldn't have access to.
Two hundred and some years ago some guys got all fed up with how they were being treated and so they wrote to the king, "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to throw off the political bonds that have connected them with another..." Well, it turns out that the king wasn't all that gracious about the whole thing and there was a lot of killing and other "lashing out" kinds of behaviors.
Our boys finally prevailed and they realized that any government (even their new government) can fall into this same oppressive mindset, so they put some things in their new constitution that might either prevent oppression altogether, or at least provide a means for citizens to throw off oppression if it occurs.One of those things is privacy. Our boys knew that if King George had been able to station a soldier in every private home, their little revolution would never have gotten off the ground.
We hear a lot of the phrase, "Who cares, I've got nothing to hide." Let's put the shoe on the other foot and ask, "If the government is doing such a good job of protecting us and not oppressing anyone, why should they fear their citizens having a lot of privacy?" In other words, the government's desire to "station a soldier" in eveyone's computer might indicate that they feel they should have something to fear.They would know best, after all.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
I never understood what the big deal is with privacy.
The big deal is that no one in this world is free from having committed actions that many others would find objectionable. There are any number of everyday activities that you do everyday that would fall into this catagory. Eat a burger lately, PETA would like to know who you are. You have a DNA gene that predisposes you to a certain disease, your health insurance company sure would like to know that. You look at hardcore (but legal) porn, the police might like to keep tabs on you. You show interest in the plight of people who might be "associated with terrorism", all sorts of agencies would love to gather what they can about you.
These are just a few off the top of my head. Heck, here's a few more: a potential landlord would surely like a look at your bank balance. Your boyfriend/girlfriend might be interested in your visits to medical clinics. Your boss might like to know how much spare time you have on weekends. Your racist neighbour might like to know about your ethnic friends. Your parents might like to track where you go on your own time. And on and on and on...
All of your actions could be legal and ethical, but that doesn't stop people who frown upon (or could benefit from) your legitimate actions from using this information against you in some way. Do you really want people you don't like you, and that you don't like, knowing everything about you?
Privacy is something that may not be required in the distant future, when humanity evolves to the point where we no longer judge one another, and there exists no reason for fear of recrimmonations for holding beliefs and taking actions that are different than anyone else's. Human nature may never allow us to ever reach this level of trust and comfort with our fellow man. So until that happens, I will value privacy until it is no longer required.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Can you say "Contempt of Court"?
A judge can pretty much order you to do anything. Whether that gets held up on appeal or is subject to reversal happens after the fact.
If you refuse the judge, bring your toothbrush.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your post illustrates the problem better than anyting else could.
I'm not buying it. Here's a way to test your theory. Delete an email message with a large pdf attachment. Wait a few days and contact Google. Tell them you had a hard drive failure and a message you deleted contained the only copy of your Ph.D. thesis. Beg, plead, cajole. Offer them anything.
I'll bet you a beer you won't get the message back. Google's long-term data retention policies have nothing to do with altruistic measures to protect users from data loss.
Okay, so let's say we did want to send emails to a small group of people without it coming back to haunt us. This is a lot of work, but then, if you want to do something illegal, you'll probably consider it reasonable.
/dev/null (after you finish setting it up, of course -- heh) and only offers one outward-facing service: ssh.
;)
:)
First: set up a computer on a residential connection that sends all logs to
Second: set up local accounts for all the people you want to communicate with, and limit them reading their mail locally via ssh only.
Third: Show each user how to read the email by sshing into the machine and reading the text mails with vi, or with mutt, or some other command-line emailer.
Fourth: Create an iso that can be used to set the box back up from scratch to the current config, and that performs the install without user intervention, and employs a disk-wiping mechanism during the install.
Fifth: Set the computer to boot from CD first, and a cron job to reboot the machine every night at 2am.
Now you can happily send email to each other all day long. Every evening, the box reboots, wipes itself, and reloads everything, so mail isn't stored locally for more than 22 hours or so, limiting the amount of incriminating evidence on the machine. Even if the machine's traffic is captured and stored, the encryption is via ssh, so you can't provide your private key for decryption -- there isn't one.
Your only real concerns now are ssh exploits, weak passwords, and your cohorts cut and pasting content from the ssh session onto their local computer. But then, if they'd do that, there are probably lots of other ways they're screwing up the heist.
Also, having never actually done anything like this, it's pure speculation. Someone tell me why it won't work.
I suspect that most ISP's have an official policy of not backingup purely for that reason.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
And they simply must take steps to ensure they cannot fulfill the request. And I don't mean Andersen shredding documents.
I mean this: if it can be done, the court may compel to you do it. So Google says "we'll keep it, but we won't do anything with it". Even if you believe them, the court may make them do something with it. So they simply can't keep it.
Same with DRM. Sony says "Yeah, a Blu-Ray disc can be made that will deactivate your player's ability to play discs, but we'd never do that." Well, they may not, but a company whose IP was breached may compel Sony to do it. Sony's only real way to avoid this is to not make it possible in the player.
Companies need to take the long view. They want to keep all their options open, but they're just going to end up making a product where the law can compel them to bone customers, and the customers will feel burned eventually.
Stop holding so much control, it's the only way forward.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If the NSA could decrypt GPG-encrypted messages, it would have to have one of the following three things:
1. A miraculous mathematical advance that made the factoring of the product of two extremely large prime numbers much easier. (Unlikely.)
2. A quantum computer. (More unlikely.)
3. More conventional computer power than the rest of the world combined. (Extremely unlikely.)
All three are completely unrealistic. It is doubtful that the NSA can crack PGP, unless it's through a weakness in one of the symmetric ciphers and not the RSA/DH algorithim.
I'm going to install cameras throughout your house. I don't see how this will harm you unless you're growing weed or bringing home prostitutes.
I'm going to install a satellite phone/monitor/GPS on your car that will phone the police if you exceed the current speed limit. I don't see how this will harm you unless you're breaking the speed limit.
I'm going to install a keystroke logger on your computer that will record everything you type. I don't see how this will harm you unless you use your computer to transfer money for gangsters.
I'm going to log every packet your computer sends that leaves the USA (Oh, wait, the NSA beat me to it...). I don't see how this will harm you unless you're secretly communicating with al Qaeda.
I'm going to steam every piece of mail that arrives in your mailbox open and photocopy it before it gets to you. I don't see how this will harm you unless you were the bastard who was sending the Anthrax letters.
I'm going to put a rootkit on that CD you bought that will contact me if you try to copy it and then break your computer. I don't see how this will harm you unless you like to rip and share music illegally.
Have I made my point?
... and they got hammered in California for it.
I remember when members of the California government put pressure on Google to add a "delete" option. I remember when people mentioned on this very forum that the button was a red herring---that archives would generally be kept in any case, and that in fact Google was one of the few e-mail providers to be completely honest about that aspect of modern e-mail. But they added the button anyway, and now someone fell for the ruse.
When will people---not just Californians, but people in general---when will people learn that you can't legislate away the behavior of an already-established system?
Take care,
Mark
There is a solution...
http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2283
See if you can understand the implications?
Question one: Does someone that refuses to implicate himself in a government witchhunt prove he is guilty?
Does someone that denies he is involved in the communist party mean he is guilty?
The point is that any american that is worth his salt SHOULD deny telling the government anything for fear that failure to state his position on something will be construed as anything other than defending his constutuional rights. Check www.papersplease.org for more information.
Erik