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Court Upholds Warrantless Internet Snooping
amigoro writes to let us know about an appeals court ruling on Friday that holds that federal agents can snoop on an individual's web surfing, email and all other forms of Internet communication habits without a warrant. The court found recording this kind of information to be analogous to the use of a pen register. In 1979 the Supreme Court ruled that this technique did not constitute a search for Fourth Amendment purposes.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
People died for the Freedom that too many of us seem willing to trade away.
If the worst thing that happens to you is some jail time because you refused to reveal your keys, consider yourself ahead of the game.
Fascism begins when the efficiency of the Government becomes more important than the Rights of the People.
Exactly.
Now, there are possible ways to get the IP addresses that you connect to WITHOUT getting any more information than that (and such information is just about useless).
But I don't trust the government to put any effort into protecting MY Freedoms and privacy when it is so much easier for them to abuse such.
There is a huge difference between knowing that I connected to 66.35.250.150 on port 80
and
Knowing that I connected to http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=247095&ci
Encryption. Learn it. Love it. Live it.
Until they illegalize it. Or, as I understand England has done, simply make it illegal to withhold your keys from government agents.
Even in the scenario where you are required to surrender your keys, encryption is still quite useful in the context of this article / warrantless searches. The authorities would need a warrant to make you surrender your keys, and you would know you were being spied upon.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Yeah, but it's sort of hard to encrypt URLs that you enter into you browser.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
The constitution isn't divine. I call for a reform.
Be careful what you wish for - the "reform" might not be quite what you wanted, citizen.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sorry but this is bad news. Suppose you read an article on Fark, some guy gets busted making explosives or smoking salvia or anything crazy like that. You, being the curious type, do a little research and end up on some sites devoted to spreading information the application of which would be illegal. Whether or not you do anything illegal, you make some friends and hang around on their message board or IRC channel where 95% of the talk is off topic anyay.
Now the feds using their tap into the AT&T backbone and their data mining software pull your IP address as going to www.illegal.com repeatedly, and maybe looking at some lab glassware on ebay or whatever. This could amount to probable cause to raid your ass and seriously ruin your day.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Here is a little snippet from the Fine ruling..... Surveillance techniques that enable the government to determine not only the IP addresses that a person accesses but also the uniform resource locators (URL) of the pages visited might be more constitutionally problematic. A URL, unlike an IP address, identifies the particular document within a website that a person views and thus reveals much more information about the persons Internet activity. For instance, a surveillance technique that captures IP addresses would show only that a person visited the New York Times' website at http://www.nytimes.com/ whereas a technique that captures URLs would also divulge the particular articles the person viewed. They seem to be saying it's more problematic if this surveillance technique is capable of yielding any useful information. Please explain why the government would even want to use any technique that's not useful ? Well, ok, some hypothetical other government, not the incompetent boobs we are stuck with. But you get my point. Another point to consider, the 9th circuit is the most frequently overturned court in the countryhttp://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2 006/11/supreme_court_cleans_up_after.html
If reviewed by the supreme court, it very well might not stand.
It gets them MORE; the public success of a witch-hunt is measured in the gross number of people accused, not the net number actually guilty of anything.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
The way I look at it, if you could catch one more "bad guy" a day
Lots.
As opposed to Ben Franklin's:
They'd rather follow Otto Bismark's opinion:
The problem is that it is the Government that chooses what "crime" and what "evidence" will be used to charge a person.
And the Government is composed of people. Sometimes honourable. Many times petty and vindictive if not outright criminals. Which is why our country was founded upon the belief that you cannot trust the Government. That we had to limit the Government's authority and protect the Rights of the People.
It's all about how you view Rights and whether you are with Franklin or Bismark.
We are picking from close to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to politicians.
To me that puts the blame for this entire mess squarely on our shoulders. I saw a great poster the other day that says, "Child prostitutions exists because YOU pay for it." I apply the same rules to spam and politics. The sellers are the serpent. The buyers are the sinners.
What?
The problem is they're all idiots, so when you vote one out, another comes in.
Not exactly. While the decision isn't binding anywhere but in the Ninth, it is persuasive authority everywhere. And given that the 9th is the most liberal circuit in the nation, how could a judge elsewhere decide that the decision isn't liberal enough?