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US Wants Courts to OK Warrantless Email Snooping
Erris writes "The Register is reporting that the US government is seeking unprecedented access to private communications between citizens. 'On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government's request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case centering on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. ... the position that the United States government is taking if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody's email at any time without a warrant. The most distressing argument the government makes in the Warshak case is that the government need not follow the Fourth Amendment in reading emails sent by or through most commercial ISPs. The terms of service (TOS) of many ISPs permit those ISPs to monitor user activities to prevent fraud, enforce the TOS, or protect the ISP or others, or to comply with legal process. If you use an ISP and the ISP may monitor what you do, then you have waived any and all constitutional privacy rights in any communications or other use of the ISP.'"
Perhaps you and the GP should read TFA and become aware of some of the issues here.
Oh, and for the "it's the Register, pooh pooh" crowd, the original FA was frist psoted on Security Focus.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
No problem... let them snoop. Now I'll just be twiddling the "Encrypt and sign all outgoing email" box on my MUA, and finally start using GPG full-time for all of my incoming and outgoing email, instead of with just my friends and close colleagues.
There are plugins for Evolution, pine, mutt, Thunderbird and just about every other Mail User Agent you can find out there.
Another great benefit, is that I can automatically block/quarantine/delete any and all email that does not contain a gpg-signed component (i.e. 99.999% of all email out there, mostly spam). dspam does an amazing job, but being able to just reject it at the MTA level would be great.
And for those that wish to converse with me, please make sure to use my GPG key to do so (also available here with detailed instructions).