Obama Administration Wants Your Old Email

Nemesisghost wrote to us with a story about attempts to reform the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Under the act, messages left on a server are considered abandoned after six months and are trivially subpoenaed by law enforcement. A group of ISPs is lobbying to extend the protections afforded to locally stored messages to messages stored on third party servers, but the Obama administration is urging Congress not to reform the law.

Comments

Obama Brought back Jobs and Growth

[bit trollent]

Look at this chart.

That chart shows that Barack Obama saved the economy from the Republican engineered disaster.

A decade of Republican policies brought us an economic disaster. Barack Obama brought us back to growth and put us on the path for prosparity.

We may wish it was faster, but every competent software developer already has a job, and the economy is only getting better. Err.. it was until the Republican party decided to shut down the government for the second time in as many decades.

The people who complain that our recovery isn't fast enough advocate the policies (of insane deregulation) that brought us the economic disaster in the first place. And now of course they are doing their best to kill the recovery before it reaches the rest of the country.

Just like they want to kill health care reform before it saves to many lives.

Re:Obama Brought back Jobs and Growth

[Shakrai]

Actually we to kill health care "reform" because it takes away the individual right to choose and represents a frightening expansion of Government. Few people would argue in favor of the status quo. We just don't think a 2,200 page rube goldberg piece of legislation that claims the power to regulate economic inactivity is the best way to go about fixing what is broken.

Have you actually read the legislation that your party rammed down the throats of the American people? Did you know it makes it illegal to start up new hospitals? Did you know that it sets minimum standards of insurance that will preclude people from buying high deductible policies even if those policies make economic sense for them? Do you know they helped to pay for it by imposing excise taxes on medical devices (everything from pacemakers to breast implants) that will increase the cost of those devices and further inflate health care costs?

This legislation stinks. Sorry that you are too busy hating the GOP and gloating over your supposed victory to see that.

Re:Obama acomplishments

[afidel]

What war in Libya? We've basically done some live bombing practice and sent in a handful of trainers and some covert troops. We expended more resources arresting Noriega.

Re:Obama acomplishments

[nomadic]

If anyone but Bush and maybe a handful of neocon politicians had been in office, we would not have gone to war in Iraq. It took active fraud and a bizarre and paranoid worldview to think that it was a good idea; 99% of Republicans and 100% of Democrats would have refrained from invading Iraq.

Re:Obama acomplishments

[airfoobar]

Never said it's all it takes, just that it's more important than having an intelligent candidate. If memory serves, Perot fucked up royally by dropping out, didn't he? Besides, even he may have had less funding than the D/R campaigns. Obama's new campaign is budgeted at $1bn, for instance.

Re:Obama acomplishments

[nomadic]

Not only that GWB has a MBA from Harvard. 0 has kept his records closed, why is that do you suppose? Don't the American people deserve to see the school accomplishments of the "smartest President ever"? What was his SAT/ACT score I wonder?

He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Re:Obama acomplishments

[Shakrai]

If it were McCain right now we'd already be rounding Arabs up into concentration camps (whoops "internment camps")

I hate to break it to you but the only President that ever did that was a Democrat.

Re:One good reason to avoid webmail.

[niftydude]

If you are worried about privacy, then you shouldn't use outsourced webmail at all.

I was astounded to find out the other day that on yahoo mail servers, the word delete doesn't mean what you think it means. It just ticks a bit in a db field which prevents the email showing in your inbox and being counted in your quota.

However, the yahoo coders were too incompetent to leave the emails out of the search function.

Imagine my surprise when I performed a search recently, and emails I had deleted and emptied from my trash in 2007 showed up!!!

Are those emails considered abandoned (since I marked them as deleted) and available under this new legislation?
There is no privacy in the cloud.

Re:Obama acomplishments

[russotto]

Don't forget that instead of universal health care he got us a universal requirement to purchase private insurance.

Which was a Republican Idea (TM).

No, sorry, that little bit of evil was brought to you by the late Ted Kennedy (D) Chappaquiddick.

Re:Obama acomplishments

[bmo]

No, it was a Mitt Romney idea.

Wow, the doublethink in your head must be staggering.

--
BMO

Re:Obama acomplishments

[s4m7]

The concept of the individual health insurance mandate originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO). http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004182