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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.
The only thing that Obama did good was get elected. Every single person except real left wing die hards are cursing him. What has he really accomplished? Obamacare was slim ball way to pass such a huge measure.
Well here would be one big reason to avoid webmail or outsourced mail servers in general.
Although most people really aren't "geeky" enough to avoid having someone else handle their email server. This law is just attempting to take advantage of the average n00b's clueless and disorganized nature....
+...calling something at the bottom of that big pile on your desk "abandoned".
They should enforce a standard like that for out of print creative works...
It's all just a part of the Corporate/Individual double standard that both parties heartily embrace.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Is my old data on a cloud based system considered abandoned if I continue to actively use the system but don't touch some items?
So they would require an additional warrant to investigate additional email addresses for emails older than 6 months? if someone had a PO box and a residential post box, does the law require 2 warrants to search each of the post boxes? the legal requirement should match this.
However I disagree with the consideration that emails on a web server that are 6 months old on are abandoned.. i have 6 year old emails on the web that i still refer to occasionally, with a push to the more efficient cloud computing its important to recognize this, a web based email account should be considered the same as a PO box as far as privacy is concerned.
Just watch 'V for Vendetta' the other day, and got the feeling that governments around the world are becoming scary similar to British Government protayed in the movie. They are not killing people but it is truly scary the amount of invasion of the privacy the government wants to "Protect you from the terrorist " .
Let's increase this term to Life + 95 years for e-mails sent by people, 120 years for those sent by corporations (including works for hire). For e-mails that are in the outbox, drafts, or any other unsent mail, it's life + 95 years, or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever is shorter.
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.
If the people don't have the right to be secure in their papers and effects (by extension, computers and emails), what right does the government have (by extension) to
-buy weapons systems that didn't exist when the Constitution was written?
-set up a cyberspace command?
-use electronic money?
When interpreting the people's rights, it's always done to the letter. When interpreting the government's rights, it's done expansively. [/rant]
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
In the interest of fairness, we're also bombing the rebels.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
As much as I disliked Bush and I prefer Obama, things are improving because of the business cycle. Presidents really don't have that much control over an economy.
Yeah, the Reps passed laws that greatly reduced regulation in the financial markets, but I'm not so sure they caused it - poured gasoline on the fire, but didn't start it.
You've done not one good goddamn thing since you were elected. Gitmo closed? Nope. Healthcare reform? Nope (the law that was passed is NOT reform, since it addresses none of the real problems of the existing system - just forces everyone into the same broken system) Patriot Act still in force? Check. Making war on yet another Middle Eastern country (hey, at least Bush got congress to go along) Check. In bed with big business? Checkerino (see also GE / Jeffery Immelt) This is complete and utter bullshit. I use various gmail accounts and such to arvhive old client e-mails. It is certainly not "abandoned". I will be contacting my congressman about this immediately.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
I had forgotten about this, assuming I actually heard about it at the time. I think that with current technology, such as imap, the definition of "abandoned mail" needs updating. I personally think that after a certain period of no access, ISPs should be allowed (maybe even required) to purge the email. I don't think the government should EVER have free access to it. I don't care how long it's been. I think 6 months is probably to short a time, but I do think there should be a time set. I would also be willing to consider some sort of provision for access in the case of concern over the welfare of the account holder, again w/ appropriate safeguards.
If that is true all benefits of IMAP are gone. You have to go back to POPing your email to local storage. It is really harder and harder to run your own email server -- with all that useless SPAM blocker provider, with so many false positive blocks...
... and Obama has disappointed me at nearly every turn.
The problem is, the alternatives on the other side just suck. Look at who's got irons in the fire on the Republican side for the Presidential nomination in 2012. Sorry, but I can't go there. Completely unacceptable.
We lefties have a choice between right of Reagan, and the Republicans. Third parties are a joke, because right now, all of them have really loopy things in their platforms, like the Greens with their anti-nuke contingent (currently inflating the Japan tragedy into something it isn't).
It's funny how the current batch of Republicans worship the Ghost of Reagan. Reagan would be called a RINO in today's GOP.
This Leftie thinks that the only decently left place in the US is Vermont.
--
BMO
I use IMAP for my email. I access my email every day, but the messages are stored on a server. Everyone who uses Hotmail or Gmail stores their email on a server. Is the claim in the summary that it really is trivial to access that email because it's "abandoned" citable? Cause I'd really rather not have it be that easy to skirt the fourth amendment just because some legislation didn't predict the future.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
You don't understand. Both sides want you in servitude, The republicans just don't pretend they don't. The only difference is how they get you into servitude. One side will get you there by taxes, the other side will get you there by protecting you from yourself.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Hmm.... did I at *any* point commend what the US does, and did in Iraq and Afghanistan ?
Me disliking Obama and his actions doesn't automatically mean i endorse GWB
And it fits with my previous analogy - UN also authorised the bloodshed in Jugoslavija.. for no reason, too as it was found out later
I don't know what sort of people demanded either, but i sure wouldn't like to go anywhere near them... see H. Thaci.
After electing another Republican house majority we should have expected the government to be shut down.
Hell yeah, that's why we did it. When either party gets rubber-stamp power, government works.. too well. They go crazy and give themselves and their cronies whatever they want with money that should be spent for the nation's benefit, or returned (not taxed next year) to the citizens. Then they vote to raise taxes to feed their evil schemes. We should want gridlock. We should praise the days when Federal government doesn't work.
Yeah, because Obama did so much to stop that from happening in the time he had free reign to stop it. Get a clue. The man could have done anything he wanted to do to help the middle class and what did he do? He bailed out the insurance industry in the guise of health care reform.
Since when was http://http//www.digitaldueprocess.org/ a valid link?
So this basically means that the mail you leave on the server and only read with IMAP can be subpoenaed if it was sent more than six months ago? Think of all the people with a gmail account. Think of all the webservices, even businesses use. My god, America is turning into 1984.
And I have to ask this: is there maybe also a data retention law that states that ISPs need to retain say a year's worth of data? Now I know that data is not equal to email, but laws like this make it damn easy for the government to get just about anything they want from everybody.
My mail server is inside my house, in the skeletal chassis of a stripped down laptop, ten seconds and a sledgehammer and it's destroyed. Though backups are password protected on an ftp server somewhere so I'm guess it's vulnerable to a rubber hose attack
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Really it seems to be what most of it turns into. Far too many were willing to take anything "but Bush"; and many true conservatives were in the camp of anyone but McCain yet we still had our senses and would never vote for Obama; that as soon as the press piled on no one else in the Democratic party had a chance. Sorry, but Hillary would have made a much better President. This guy really comes off as someone who could step outside in the rain and not decide that its raining.
We have near record prices at the pump, we have very high unemployment, we have the Libyan issue, Gitmo, the Bush started wars, and we have deficit spending at a level I don't even think Bush would have tried. Yet what we don't have is a press willing to take Obama on. They seem to still be enamored with him. At least when we had Bush in office we could count on the press to constantly ride his ass over every little thing. While it got tiresome on some fronts it kept people informed as to what was going on and what was being done. Hell, where are all the Democrats screaming about gasoline prices now? Can you imagine the outrage if Bush had said "get used to it?"
The last thing America needs is a President the press likes, the worst possible outcome is a President they are essentially in love with. Obama comes of as Bush Squared. Meaning, if it was bad under Bush it is just as bad under Obama if not worse. Hell, I think he managed to pick an AG worse than than Bush.
With the Republicans in charge of Congress I was hoping that Obama would wake up and try to lead. Before the losses in 10 he was overly willing to allow Democratic leadership to run amok in Congress and lead on any idea he wanted. He would not make decisions, define the goal, or even try to compromise. As such we got abominations of bills and no clear leadership. We had a Congress which REFUSED to submit a budget for consideration simply because the Democratic leadership at the time did not want to deal with it during an election year and suddenly if you asked the press it is all the Republican's fault for not passing what should have been passed LAST YEAR under Pelosi.
No, we need to get back to Presidents the press don't like. I know it sounds like a negative but the point is, the very people that many Americans need to provide them the truth about their government apparently need incentive to investigate it.
This Presidency is more about Wall Street and big money than Bush ever was. There are rumors of a BILLION dollar reelection campaign. Tell me how that is representative of main street and the American people.
As for accomplishments. I find them all neutered simply because of the deficit and the his lack of trying to fix it. We cannot tax our way out of it, we could take 100% of the earnings above 250k per year for those who earn it and still not reduce it by half. We simply spend too much and very few on either side of the aisle are even trying to do anything about it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
>>Obama is NOT a socialist, and that's a shame, because that's what the US needed. It is what we still need.
>>[Bush] increased inequality to points nearly as high as our nation has ever seen in its history
If you're talking about income inequality, it doesn't actually matter. In fact, using the term is generally a clear sign the person doesn't know anything about anything, and is just parroting some rant he read online.
Why doesn't it matter? Think about a country in which everyone makes 20% more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than the year before. This is A Good Thing. Everyone's doing better off.
But socialists like yourself would whine and complain that the guy making a million dollars is now making $1.2M, whereas the poor $10,000/year worker has been exploited by *only* getting a $2,000 raise. People like you repeat the tired line "The rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer." But it's not true, dude. The gap is larger, yes, but *everyone* has gotten richer.
What you want to look at instead is called "median income" (either for personal income or household income). This eliminates the effect that is the basis for all the "inequality" - people that start successful businesses get to pull in corporate-level income, instead of personal-level income. That's the key point all you idiots miss. It's like comparing marshmallows with the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. Even though all you socialists claim that it is "unfair" (whatever the hell that means) that Sergey Brin is making more than his housekeeper, the only thing unfair about the whole deal is trying to compare corporate income with personal. In fact, if you eliminate corporate income from the equations, there's much much less "income inequality" in our society.
There's nothing dastardly about people making a percentage of their corporate profits - it is the incentive that makes it worth all the time and headache to start your own business (which it is, trust me). If you ban private percentage ownership of companies (which you do, as you're a Socialist), you'll actually destroy the economy, and actually screw the working class over. But by that point, you'll probably be painting the kulaks as class traitors, so their mass starvation and cannibalism probably won't bother you at all. Maybe after you die, your successors will slowly reintroduce private ownership of capital as it is the only way they find to promote the generation of wealth.
The real question you should be asking is: "Have the rich have been getting richer by actually making the poor poorer (instead of growing faster than the poor)?"
And the answer is no. If you look at the following measures:
Median Household Income
Median Personal Income
Household Income by Quintile
Per capita GDP in PPP
Personal disposable Income
All of these measures have risen by at least 20% from the 1960s to the current day. For the rich and poor alike. Some (such as Personal Disposable Income) have risen dramatically.
In constant dollars, the poor (20th percentile) are making 225% more now than in 1947, and the rich (95th percentile) are making about 300% more. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg) By contrast, when your favorite country, a certain union of socialist republics destroyed private ownership of capital, the economy collapsed and the only thing that saved them from total ruin was allowing a bit of private ownership under the NEP and similar policies later in its history.
NO! Bad Obama! No biscuit for you!
WTF! 6-months is crap and assuming that because I keep an email on a server for more than 6 months it's abandoned? Has the fool who is proposing this ever considered that life and the things we deal with doesn't always clear itself up in 6 months. And why should anyone ever just simply be allowed to look at my emails simply because of a time stamp.
Services like Gmail and Yahoo and Hotmail etc....have made it a point to provide the average user with room to keep their emails, and so we do. This should not imply that we've abandoned an email that a provider has allowed us to keep on their server as long as we have not used up the allotted storage.
I believe our govt is stepping way too far over the line into the citizen's personal lives and it's becoming ridiculous.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Exactly, that is one of the most insulting things he has said to date. They are weasel words if ever any were spoken.
We already have words for military actions like: war, engagement, conflict, or and the original weasel term police action. There is no need to abuse the term kinetic, it adds nothing descriptive about what is happening. He simply did it because he knows his primary voting block has been trained to hate on anyone who says anything favorable about war, engagements, conflict and even police action in the same sentence with the word military. He also knows probably a full thirty percent of the people who voted for him don't know what kinetic means and are to lazy to look it up, they will just accept their messiah said it so it must be good.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
... to run your own servers. It's sad that even business these days is trusting the likes of google and yahoo with their corporate private communications.
I'm safely off at a distance, living in foreignland, where the word "government" has not become a synonym for "satan", so I really can't understand why so many people in the US want to correct their problems by removing government entirely. You do not fix something that's broken by just throwing it away and saying you can do without it.
Our government has "shut down" many, many times before, and it's never synonymous with anarchy. It's usually like when a grubby restaurant gets "shut down" by the board of health for a weekend. They clean things up, get another inspection, and work slightly better for a couple years at keeping things clean. But without that jarring shutdown, they won't clean up their act. I know you don't understand the US view of "government is evil", but that's because our country was founded on the principle that power corrupts, and that checks and balances need to be used to prevent anyone (or any group) from becoming a dictator. It's sort of ilke trying to explain FOSS ideals to someone firmly entrenched in the Microsoft world. You might be made to see intellectually why we believe what we do, but you won't fully understand until you're burned badly enough by your OS software vendor to wipe your machine and start from scratch.
You still writing those looong AC piled links to nowhere? Notice NOBODY responds to you anymore but me, and I ONLY do so to laugh at you? Why is that APK? Could it be like on Ars everyone is on to your bullshit and nobody gives a fuck what you think? Keep dancing for me monkey boy, while I don't bother reading anything you write it gives me a warm fuzzy inside to see you jump through my hoops and follow me like a little bitch who wants another taste, dance monkeyboy, dance! LOL! Here enjoy some copypasta, hell you aren't even interesting enough to bother responding to with anything else. Enjoy fail boy!
And this coming from poor wittle APK, also know as "Petey, the idiot HOPES file guy"? As in you HOPES that one of the 300,000+ constantly changing array of websites that are infected doesn't happen to be the one you visit today? Or that you HOPES that nobody notices after repeatedly being asked you have FAILED to show even the tiniest shred of mathematical proof that your magical woobie can scale? That you HOPES nobody notices your only "proof" is anecdotes, often by your own sock puppets like Kingsjester?
And I don't have to be exact, because I'm not the one making outrageous claims If someone claims they can stretch their dick into a giant slingshot and shoot themselves to Scotland it is not the readers job to prove them wrong but the posters job to back that up with real prof, not an anecdote that says "well my cousin Joey saw me do it last Halloween!".
I have also shown repeatedly that at the absolute reported minimum number of new pieces of malweare and infections, which you are free to pick whichever reputable website you like Securina, MSFT's malware reports, AVG, which ever, that at an absolute minimum we are talking about 1.2 million sites PER DAY with that number changing by 15,000+ PER HOUR which means even if you typed at 1 IP address PER SECOND, and never slept, and had a perfect list (which doesn't exist) you would be 14 days behind by the very first day with that number growing linearly every single day, making Petey farther and farther behind.
But if you weren't completely batshit insane Petey I wouldn't have to explain this, because this is why everyone makes fun of you. It is so obvious it is like someone arguing gravity is actually invisible pants gnomes trying to steal your underwear. It is the classic "default allow" which has NEVER EVER worked. Because if a piece of malware isn't in magical HOPES file Petey you are royally fucked, and yet again I have shown that it is simply a roll of the dice whether you get creamed or not, simply because you will always be behind.
So it is all on you Petey and your magical HOPES woobie now. You made the extravagant claims, back them up with the math. If you can't? Well then you are full of shit, case closed. Notice how ALL YOU CAN DO PETEY is throw insults and trollbomb? Why is that? I'll tell you why, because math doesn't lie and you just can't show the math You just can't, it would be like trying to mathematically prove you are not an idiot. It just can't be done.
So please, keep dancing to my tune like a little bitch APK, I do so enjoy pointing out the total uber fail of your magical woobie so. I also personally consider it a public service to point people to solutions that actually work instead of relying on magical woobies and anecdotes. And of course bi
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.