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Police Want Fast Track To Get At Your Private Data
An anonymous reader writes "According to this story on CNET, police again are pushing for new laws requiring ISPs and webmail providers to store users' private data for five years and also want a new electronic way of speeding up subpoenas and search warrants via police-only encrypted portals at all ISPs and webmail providers."
Aside from internal 1984 style abuse of this proposed system, the fundamental concept (and all existing implementations of it) introduces a new level of security risk and it is this exact interface that is said to be the weakness that was exploited in the Google China attack. From a computer security perspective, this is wrong on many different levels.
My work here is dung.
Or, in a much earlier age, he would be called "a patriot". Sadly, unlike our founding fathers, we have no new land to move to in order to re-establish our freedoms. So in effect, the OP's argument is the only recourse left.
It's not just that they can look at your data now, but in future too. World and politics can change really fast, especially now that US is having economical problems.
Exactly! Are you sure that any data that is available now will not violate any law they introduce in the future?
Like http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/04/extreme_images_net_suspension/ where a man is being charged for
something he did in Aug/Sept 08 but the law he broke came into being in Jan 2009.
FWIW, the US Constitution explicitly forbids ex post facto laws
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Totalitarianism is one group being given absolute authority over all aspects of its citizens lives. This country's law enforcement can't even figure out how to cooperate with each other. It's the same in the military, the different branches of government... well, pretty much everywhere you look. I don't see a "totalitarian" government springing up anytime soon.
You're imposing an absurdly high standard for what constitutes "totalitarian" here. Nazi Germany and the USSR were both characterized by a plethora of government agencies, law enforcement and otherwise, which never managed to cooperate with each other, and which often fought each other at every opportunity. Never at their worst did they achieve "absolute authority over all aspects" of ... well, anything, really. And yet they are, with good reason, the canonical modern examples of totalitarian states.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The only real private data you have is the one you keep in your head or write on a piece of paper as long as nobody has access to the said piece of paper.
Don't get me wrong here, I still encourage privacy online defenders to continue their efforts but the above statement will always remain a fact when you think about it carefully. Electronic data goes with inherent risks for privacy in my humble opinion ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.