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Senate Committee Approves Stricter Email Privacy
New submitter DJ Jones sent in good news in the attempts to update privacy rights for stored electronic communication. From the article: "The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a bill that would strengthen privacy protection for e-mails by requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant from a judge in most cases before gaining access to messages in individual accounts stored electronically. The bill is not expected to make it through Congress this year and will be the subject of negotiations next year with the Republican-led House."
The EFF seems pretty happy with the proposed changes, but notes that the bill also reduces the protections of the Video Privacy Protection Act in order to allow Netflix et al to sell your viewing history.
So how does this work with the laws allowing those nice national security letter to be issued by the fbi etc?
This might be the first time that the CIA and the FBI managed to collaborate on convincing the senate of the importance of privacy...
Of course I want to remain as anonymous as this post. Why would I be okay with Netflix selling my anonymous viewing details simply because it opens the door for a competing company that will not sell or store viewing habits. Look at DuckDuckGo. That's capitalism. Provide people a service that can or be almost be as comparable, let the people decide which is better.
Why is a bill needed for this? We have the 4th amendment already!
Here's an example of how legal protections for privacy only get enacted when someone powerful gets screwed.
The timing sure makes this look like a reaction to the Petreaus scandal. From the news reports it sounds like the only reason Petreaus got caught is because of what had been basically carte blanche for the FBI to dig through any webmail system. Under normal circumstances the FBI should not have been investigating random threatening emails to a civilian - it was only because the civilian knew an FBI agent that wanted to bone her that the FBI even got involved. It seems implausible that a judge would have issued a warrant under those circumstances, but the FBI didn't need one under current law.
It's been 25 years, long enough that most people don't remember Robert Bork's supreme court nomination casuing his video rental records to become embarrasingly public and ultimately resulting in the passage of the Video Privacy Protection Act. So its not much of a surprise that the VPPA is getting dismantled - despite the actual threat being worse today since everything is in massive centralized databases now instead of paper records in a local store.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Just when I think I understand how you function, you make a law that actually does what it's supposed to do instead of the exact opposite.
the bill also reduces the protections of the Video Privacy Protection Act in order to allow Netflix et al to sell your viewing history.
Just who does Netflix think they are, anyways? The internet is not, like, a big truck that they can just use to spy on everyone.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
One additional step would be a nice courtesy protection for the less paranoid amongst us who trust public servers:
The government should be accountable for notifying the user when an investigation is concluded (and not under secrecy) so the user is aware that documents thought private are no longer so.
Stricter email privacy has been available for many years.
Yes but that means people must be able to think beyond "click on the purty icon", such as to understand the concept of encryption vs clear text and that their emails go through 3rd party servers, and very few people are capable of that level of understanding.
People are dumb. No solution that expects otherwise can possibly succeed.
All senators want their email left under lock and key at all times. Since they can't be exempt, better law-it!
I'm serious.
"but notes that the bill also reduces the protections of the Video Privacy Protection Act in order to allow Netflix et al to sell your viewing history."
Since it's clear that tracking IPs, cookies and other fingerprints is accurate and done all the time this type of reducing in VPPA means that any type of video you view could be cause for trouble, even if at the moment the tracking data is not legally conclusive as an identification.
Watching porn, or certain types of porn is an obvious sore spot...
Less obvious would be watching any type of video deemed subversive, videos about violence, weapons, military tactics, drugs, etc... We already use circumstantial "evidence" like this to convince juries and judges. Guilt by association and interest... Or perhaps simply "suspect by association and interest", what happens when there is a shooting nearby and you become a suspect simple because the FBI is able to easy perform searches determine the types of videos that someone within a certain distance of the shooting occurred? Of course other evidence and information is required, but you have to admit that alibi's and the lack of evidence has not stopped the arrest of people before... I would guess that the average person will find themselves jobless after missing work for several days as a result of an arrest like this, even if it ends up being found as incorrect.
Look carefully for the hidden and attached.
Encrypt everything.
Patriot act/NSLs/gag orders don't work unless a third party has goods able to be surrendered.
Requiring keys to be coughed up from data owner (still) requires notification to the owner and a court order.
What ELSE are they sliding under the radar with it?
Restore the US Constitution.
Arrest the cock sucking banksters
Arrest the cock sucking oath breakers
I will then come back with a website, hosting, domains, and tv show with a vengeance.
Until then, let it all crash, I could give a shit about your job, business, or retirement, I hope you fucking lose it, fact is I don't give a fuck if this whole world blows up. I don't want to live, with these unconstitutional oath breaking mother fuckers screwing up everything full spectrum.