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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.
When the White House produces their missing emails, we'll produce ours
That should sufficiently prevent this from becoming law!
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why must we have to justify privacy? it's obvious to anyone that if a letter isn't addressed to you then it's an invasion of privacy regardless of the measures we take to stop you.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I think you miss the point. The data will be mined after the fact or to build a case against someone the gov't doesn't like.
Let's say you do something to piss some mucky-muck off and you get on the monitor list. It's only a matter of time before you mention in passing that you copied a DVD or any other heinous crime and bingo! The FBI/Federal marshals/etc are at your door.
Paranoid? I grew up in a communist state. I hate to think I've escaped to one, too....
email? Does anybody think that email is private? It is sent in clear text so I would say that it is as private as a postcard.
As I say in every discussion of this nature, "private" in the sense of "can a police officer legally look at this and use it as evidence?" is completely different than in the sense of "could a malicious person who wanted to snoop on what I was saying possibly look at this, the law be damned?"
E-mail is about as physically private as a letter. They are fairly trivial to read but it does require you take take deliberate action to do so. As opposed to a post card which could literally fall out of the postman's hand text-up and be read by accident, other people's emails don't just randomly show up on your screen even if you are an email server sysadmin.
And thanks to recent precedent email is becoming -legally- as private as a letter. Which to repeat, is a different standard, and regardless of the fact that letters are easy to read, they are still considered private. So while a malicious mail man could read your mail whenever they chose, a cop who wanted their evidence to stand up at trial could not without a warrant.
We need to remember both of these. First if you want real privacy even from malicious people, you need to encrypt your email. Second, we still need to keep unencrypted email to be legally private, since otherwise the idea is that if the police -can- read your encrypted emails then they don't count as private and thus no warrant is needed.
There is an election coming soon. So for those that really fear this find out where the candidates stand on it.
Then vote.
BTW don't focus so much on the President BTW take a hard look at your congressional reps.
True that. Sadly enough it's hard enough to get specific answers on what the Presidential candidates' stances are on the subject, much less all the representatives.
The enemies of Democracy are