Slashdot Mirror
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?
I guess we'll just have to do this the old-fashioned way. Now accepting (paper) applications for the next Paul Revere.
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
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
When the White House produces their missing emails, we'll produce ours
That should sufficiently prevent this from becoming law!
Error: Sig not found.
This article is entirely speculation. The only source it links to is an article that was not printed, and the link points to a 404 page.
Gnu Privacy Guard (or other PGP) + Judge: Man can't be forced to divulge encryption passphrase = safety in communications.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
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!
Tell the highest levels of the intelligence community what you think about this idea by picking up a phone and calling any number.
I know, it's not original.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
> We'll see what our governments have to say about that.
Something along the lines of "More! More! Harder! Deeper!" is my guess.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Seriously. There are already libraries such as FLTK and QT for the graphic front end. For the back end, you could use XySSL, OpenSSL, or even GNU GPG.
I'm about 20 hours into an encryption client, and I've already got people using it. I initially wanted to use GPG, but realized that most technophobes won't go for a command line application. So I pulled out FLUID (the FLTK design utility) and had a prototype working within hours.
Today, there's no excuse for not encrypting your email. I realize that you may think you have Constitutional rights in this regard, but GW & Co. have the guns, the taxpayer financing, and even the (unsolicited!) cooperation of the major network carriers. It doesn't matter what you think the Constitution says if you can't even get a trial. You're on your own from here on out.
So why encrypt, even if you've nothing to hide? Well, simple, really. Why let the government violate the 4th ammendment with impunity? If you encrypt your email, the government can't perform secret, mass surveillance. Sure, they can pound on your door, and even demand the key. You might even have to give it to them. But in them doing so, you've achieved three key goals:
Encryption is highly Constitutional (TM) software. It keeps terrorists from eavesdropping on our conversations, knowing our whereabouts, and stealing our valuable intellectual property. If the government can't read my email, neither can the terrorists.
Be patriotic. Support the Constitution. Encrypt everything.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Unless it's bundled with Windows then a mass change to encrypted email simply isn't going to happen.
Encryption should have been built into the protocols from the start but now I'm afraid the horse has bolted.
No sig today...
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.
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
The main obstacle to mass encryption these days is Microsoft. I expect to be skating over Hell's frozen wasteland before Microsoft adopts encryption in Outlook/Hotmail.
I've been encrypting and signing mail in Outlook Express and Outlook for years. The certificates are installed via XENROLL.DLL or CERTENROLL.DLL. Windows actually has a really good encrytion API.
If you go here you can get a free e-mail certificate. Once you install it to the cryptography store you can sign and encrypt mail in any Microsoft email program. If you use the Windows Live Mail application you can encrypt messages in Hotmail too.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Defense...
"I don't recall"
I hate to be the one that brings this up, but it needs to be said:
If the Bush administration 'loses' and 'accidentally deletes all traces' of their email every time they are being investigated, how could our inept government monitor the email of over 300,000,000 people in america?
Certainly there is a LOT of sarcasm in that question, but seriously [b]what grounds to they legitimately have[/b] to require access to users email WITHOUT a warrant? None if you consider that even our White House has redundant backup of their email which is likely on some cheesy Exchange server somewhere.
That means they have tons of time to get a warrant should it be justified.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
nah, i haven't been to rotten.com or cia.gov in a while.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
There is a firefox plugin Firegpg that you can use with gmail to encrypt, sign, and decrypt email.
I dunno if it works with yahoo....it might...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.