Slashdot Mirror
US Police Increasingly Peeping At Email, IMs
angry tapir writes "US law enforcement organizations are making tens of thousands of requests for private electronic information from companies such as Sprint, Facebook and AOL, but few detailed statistics are available, according to a privacy researcher. Police and other agencies have 'enthusiastically embraced' asking for e-mail, instant messages and mobile-phone location data, but there's no US federal law that requires the reporting of requests for stored communications data, according to Christopher Soghoian, a doctoral candidate at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University."
This has already been reported
It's easy for me and it's easy for you - it's even easy to use once it's set up (assuming they are vigilant). But if I told my (very non-geek) girlfriend to encrypt her e-mails, she would have no clue on where to start. I could certainly help her but the problem is that not everyone has someone to ask or would even care enough to do so (obvious, since most people don't encrypt their email).
I definitely agree that everything should be encrypted, it has a great deal of benefits (aside from my opinion that cryptography is just fascinating). It's problematic though, since most people don't think that way - now we're back at square one, how am I supposed to send an encrypted e-mail to someone without a public key? Even if they had one, we still run into some problems with people not paying attention to what they are doing (did they verify that the fingerprint I gave them matched before they trusted my public key? Not likely).
I think computer security in general is far removed from many people's minds outside of paying their 40$/yr to Symantec. E-Mail encryption? They simply don't care.
will fix all of this, oh wait, by the standard of law naming in Congress this will do the opposite of what it claims.
See http://www.washingtonwatch.com/bills/show/112_SN_799.html and http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-privacy-bill-of-rights-is-in-the-bill-of-rights/
[T]he measure applies only to companies and some nonprofit groups, not to the federal, state, and local police agencies that have adopted high-tech surveillance technologies including cell phone tracking, GPS bugs, and requests to Internet companies for users’ personal information–in many cases without obtaining a search warrant from a judge.
---
In other words, the government seems keen on protecting us from ourselves while opening us to them by any means. It really comes down to crafting laws with safe sounding names all in an effort to circumvent the Constitution. As most realize, Congress's favorite activity of the last fifty or so years has been how to get around the limits our Founding Fathers placed on the Federal Government.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.