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US Policy Would Allow Government Access to Any Email
An anonymous reader writes "National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is currently helping to draft a new Cyber-Security Policy that could make the debate over warrantless wiretaps seem like a petty squabble. The new policy would allow the government to access to the content of any email, file transfer, or web search."
And what is it going to do about my encryption keys?
Not that I support this, but I sure as hell don't intend to make it easy for people to invade my privacy when I'm not doing anything illegal.
...is sadly dying. But it's ok because if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide right?
so he can get through something we would consider "less onerous" but is still an affront to the Constitution.
If they're really trying to tap all that nonsense, it'll end up being a bit of a pain trying to pull the noise out of the signal at that point. It'd be relatively trivial to generate vast quantities of legit-looking noise to hide a small covert signal--and while data analysis algorithms and computer speeds have been steadily increasing, it's a bit of an arms race to keep up with the regular legitimate traffic, much less any obfuscation attempts.
In the end, it's probably a lot more trouble than it's worth to go about things this way, rather than doing the 'traditional' sort of real-life investigation leading to a warrant &c.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Because you can be damn sure that if they pass this law people will finally make sure to heavily encrypt what they say on the internet.
Then again, it's almost certain that they're already reading all the e-mail. This law is probably just to prevent them from getting sued about it later. Ug
When the White House produces their missing emails, we'll produce ours
That should sufficiently prevent this from becoming law!
Error: Sig not found.
You need to have this sort of thing because you can't let the terrorists win, so what if you have to give up basic fundamental rights like privacy at least the terrorists won't have won.....
Oh hang on we were fighting for freedom and liberty weren't we? So you need to give up all your freedoms to protect your freedom? You'd almost thought that the government was a repressive regime that wanted to subjugate people.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
So, that would mean that the societies with the most surveillance were the most secure, right?
As any one knows prisons and navy ships (i.e. the ultimate panopticon) have zero crime rates.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Regardless of the laws, we've already seen that the telecoms will grant the government whatever access it wants. If they get busted, they'll go cry to Congress for retroactive protection. Same results with or without legal protection of your privacy.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Tag: fuckyouiwontdowhatyoutellme
I'm gonna need a spec.
While we're at it, let's stop calling this "big brother" (as if goverment loves you underneath all the abuse) and "erosion" of rights (as if it's a natural process we should adapt to), and start referring to these attacks on human rights for what they really are: oppression.
My friends, it is high time we start encrypting everything. We'll just have to make PGP/GPG easier to use by the masses.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Does GMail support encryption though it's web client? Does Yahoo?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It seems the above comment focuses on "will probably" without sources, much like the Raw Story unsigned editorial.
Has anybody actually SEEN the draft so that we can comment on it intelligently without relying on "I think the US government is bad, so I'm going to assume they're doing horrible things"? The PDF link in the Rawstory unsigned editorial doesn't work, so it's awfully hard to evaluate their claims. The homepage of Rawstory makes their bias pretty clear, so I'm inclined to not just take their word.
More likely less than five minutes. Have you seen video of people being waterboarded?
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
These people are completely insane. They follow up every single total catastrophe in which they made us more endangered while demanding to violate our rights ever more with yet another demand to screw us while just scaring us and endangering us.
I mean, they're still spinning down how a Filipino Monkey almost gave Bush a pretext for armageddon with Iran last week, continuing to blame Iran.
They still act like they don't even really know for sure who is "the enemy" in Iraq, or when the next Taliban attack will show how badly we're losing in Afghanistan to a bunch of medieval hicks hellbent on returning to the Stone Age.
And yes, they're still spying on every email, Web hit and phonecall in the US (hi, Dick!), while hustling to hand telcos amnesty for breaking the law at their request, even though they can't even pay the phonebill so it gets shut down.
These Keystone Konservatives would be hilarious if they weren't the most dangerous people ever in the world.
We have to call our lazy, complacent congressmembers and insist they impeach these criminal retards, instead of just easily running against them this year and inheriting all their catastrophic tyrannical powers.
--
make install -not war
Presumption of guilt could be made automatic if the content of encrypted material is not made available.
Not constitutional, but then, many things aren't.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
My feeling on any legislation (which this ISN'T) of this sort is sort of how I feel about the draft - anybody would have to be absolutely mental to put it into law. No congressperson wants to have any of their private correspondences probed, not to mention the voting public. It'd be the end of their (political) career in an instant. It's the old analogy of the frog in water - slowly turn up the heat and it will stay, but if you put a frog in extremely hot water, it will jump out. If you're gonna take away freedoms like this, it can't be in one fell swoop. Or, if it is, it needs to be after some big event (e.g. Pearl Harbor, 9/11).
There's no way this will ever even come near coming true.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
I was born here in California and have lived here all my life. Never been out of the country even once, barely even been out of the state, either. Next month I'll be 43 years old. When I was a kid, sure, there were things going on that weren't too cool, but there were still things to be proud about the country I was born and raised in. I can't say that anymore. I love my country, still, especially living in California, but I'm ashamed of my government and the things it's doing and allowing to be done, and even the mere MENTION of things like this, true or not, make me feel weary down to my very bones. I don't care to see it all destroyed, but it needs to be FIXED, and it needs to be fixed NOW before these bastards make it all come crashing down around our ears.
Somebody needs to get cracking to devise a cipher that looks just like these spam noise words... something along the lines of a one-time pad
What ever happened to the founding father's view that tyrany was ever vigilant and the tyrant would use any means to strip liberty away from its citizens?
Oh yeah, that isnt taught in schools :(
It, freedom from tyranny, not being taught in school may be part of the problem but another part is that those alive now haven't had to fight to preserve it. I think Thomas Jefferson hit it on the head when he suggested there should be a revolution about every 20 years. If you're born and raised under it more than likely you're going to be complacent.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You joke, But in reality that's probably why the RealID cards stop at people born before 1964. That's the baby-boomer cutoff year, representing a very large demographic who still remember what its like to organize against repression.
They'd rather use GenXers as guinea pigs, a much smaller demographic that's not used to having governments and markets abide by their demands (or needs). They are also much more steeped in the individualist mindset such that they're capable of mass-organizing very little outside of the corporate environment.
So yes, you could say the Bill Of Rights is only for old people...
I haven't yet seen the details of the policy, but if it allows the US government access to any message transferred or stored on a US-based computing device, I think it's time for the rest of the world to abandon GMail, Yahoo mail etc. in droves.
Every US citizen needs to read Deterring Democracy (Noam Chomsky) or failing that, try The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein); your government is out of control.
Once upon a time, some people imagined that the internet would be the ultimate platform for free speech. Terrorists will simply get more creative in their communication technology (e.g. steganography on Flickr or other image-sharing web-sites) - it's the regular folk who are losing privacy, not by inches but by miles.