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Cops To Congress: We Need Logs of Americans' Text Messages
Dainsanefh tips a CNET report about a number of law enforcement groups who have put forth a proposal to the U.S. Senate to require wireless providers to keep logs of subscriber text messages for a minimum of two years.
"As the popularity of text messages has exploded in recent years, so has their use in criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. They have been introduced as evidence in armed robbery, cocaine distribution, and wire fraud prosecutions. In one 2009 case in Michigan, wireless provider SkyTel turned over the contents of 626,638 SMS messages, a figure described by a federal judge as 'staggering.' Chuck DeWitt, a spokesman for the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, which represents the 63 largest U.S. police forces including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago, said 'all such records should be retained for two years.' Some providers, like Verizon, retain the contents of SMS messages for a brief period of time, while others like T-Mobile do not store them at all. Along with the police association, other law enforcement groups making the request to the Senate include the National District Attorneys' Association, the National Sheriffs' Association, and the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, DeWitt said."
We'll start using encrypted apps instead of SMS
No.
These messages shouldn't be archived. If the police need to see the communications, they should be required to get a warrent, and only be able to intercept communications as their happening - as would happen with a wiretap.
Law enforcement should not be able to go back through prior communications that occurred before they got a warrant.
Does the USPS need to scan all letters? Do cell conversations need to be recorded and stored? Do emails need to be retained by the host?
Is this April 1st?
How about complete audio recordings of all phone calls, and copies of every piece of mail delivered?
Or did you try that before, and ran into some trouble with the Supreme Court, the Fourth Ammendment, and a planet full of Ewoks over forty years ago?
Why not require cops to put video/audio recorders in all their cars and require them to keep the tapes for 2 years. Make any missing tape a felony so that the incentive to "lose" them disappears. That would do more to make our country a better place than keeping SMS messages.
Do you have ESP?
And yet, you are totally missing the point. Its not a question of whether they should be able to obtain the messages, legally, with a warrant (which, incidentally, they currently don't actually need as far as I know). Thats totally off topic, if its there, of course they can get at it with cause.
The question is, why should it be retained. Why should the phone company be REQUIRED to store data, from everyone, all the time, based on their assertion that they might need to request it later?
My phone calls are not recorded, why should they not also be required to retain the audio of the calls? Why, other than current details of old laws, should the two types of personal data, be in in any way, treated differently?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Very true, but it means that there has to be active work done instead of just a cronjob of a bunch of greps that spit out results.
Every time a proposal like this hits, it just escalates the arms race:
IP addresses get logged, the crooks move to proxies. Said proxies get raided, they moved to offshore ones in countries that are at best indifferent to US demands.
P2P swarms get recorded, so people just find a fast proxy across the pond.
If text messages get recorded, there are a lot of smartphone apps for Android, iOS and the other big names.
Don't forget businesses... they will end up getting pushed to Silent Circle, or some type of encrypted network as well.
End result: With demanding more and more logkeeping by ISPs, it just means that the logs will be worthless as people reach for encryption programs.
I like the fact that my library (and most others) destroy records of checkouts after you return a book so that the information can't be used in an investigation or trial.
Just because I read some Karl Marx, doesn't make me a commie. Likewise, just because I texted a quote from the Koran doesn't make me a terrorist.
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
it would be unrealistic to record every phone call
I disagree. The capacity of communications networks increases over time, but the user base of voice does not increase as fast because it's already hit saturation. Say there are 300 million cell phone subscribers in a market, and each spends 1000 minutes on the phone per month, and each call is recorded at 8 kilobits per second. 300,000,000*1000*60*8/8 is only 18 terabytes per month. What's the total size in bytes of video uploaded to, say, YouTube per month?
Why encrypt data if you do to care if the government knows it? Because it's none of their fucking business. Or you actually believe that the FBI could not know everything about you if they wanted to? If they want to waste their time, they can go right ahead. I'm not going to help them, though. Let them bore the fuck out of themselves. Encryption does no good if you control the sender/receiver, or built a back-door into the encryptor/phone to begin with. No shit.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
For my part, everything in my house, save the gaming rigs, uses encrypted storage not because I have anything terribly important stored, but because I want it to be as difficult and time-consuming as humanly possible for the jackboots to find absolutely nothing. I'm sort of an asshole like that.
I was investigated repeatedly by the NSA and they couldn't produce more than half a sheet of paper about me. They got a 20 page thick tome when they were done, made up entirely of things I admitted to under polygraph, and denied my clearance. 80% of my life was unaccountable to them. It frightened the shit out of them.
I don't go to any great lengths to hide. I'm just highly compartmentalized, enough that few people know much about me at all, and there's not a lot of pieces to put together. People who grew up with me can't ascribe anything more to me than face-value. Where does he go? What are his hobbies? Oh... I dunno, we just went to high school together for four years, never seen him outside school, never talked about his home life or family ... he seems good at computers, I think one day he'll be Bill Gates..
Absolutely nothing on me. Not like... no criminal history, no dirt... but nothing. I look like a constructed identity. A really obvious constructed identity. Problem is they're looking at my real identity and I have no actual background; records for school, medical records--which barely fit on half a page--and a few people who recognize my name but know nothing about me and have no alibi for where I've been ever.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Then you were denied a clearance for an obvious lack of community ties. Stuff like that is important, because if you're going to be trusted with sensitive information, your superiors will want to be sure you have "something to lose," like your family and friends back home. If you are a non-entity with no clear motives and no attachments to other people, what's to stop you from selling everything you know to the highest bidder?
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Wow, you're life sounds boring, incredibly boring.
Polygraphs aren't used as lie-detectors (by any one competent). They're used to trick people into confessing (like all interrogation techniques).
When I was at LANL (2006) they didn't require them for clearance (and most of the cleared staff scientists I knew outright stated they would have refused them for exactly the reason you point out), but they did offer it as an option for "expedited clearance."
Currently, the FBI really only sticks its nose into people that have done something 'big.'
You're serious? You haven't seen the dozens of cases where the FBI manufactured a bomb plot from some moron who chimed in on a 'shady' website that he wanted to bomb the US?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
UID 723572 doesn't seem to hide anything imho. He is just very conscience about his position in a world where both the government and corporate entities want to know ALL there is about EVERYONE. He probably prefers to talk personally rather than SMS/tweet/FB/chat everything to the entire world, and I salute him for it, for he is right. /. reader, REALLY believe terrorists and paedophiles use facebook to achieve their goals? Really? I surely hope not. So why does the government have to be able to access that? ...Or go and live in North Korea for a while...
:-)
Somehow western societies (both in Yurp and Yankeeland) these day's think you are a weirdo if you like your privacy.
The "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"-card is played far to easy, just as the "we need to do this to fight terrorists/paedophiles"-card. (respectively Yankeeland and Yurp in case you wondered) Do you, as a
The exception here is Germany, but than again they have had some experience with the government wanting to know a little bit to much about its civilians (Gestapo / Stasi, in case you were puzzled a bit again). The most important tool a government has to control its people is data. And if you think things like that wont happen these day's I guess you go and do a history course...
While you're there say hi to the guys of the SSD for me, will you!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Security_Department
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
That's the whole point. I pointed out in a talk once that the unencrypted email we used (this was in the 90s) was like sending everything written on a postcard. Encrypted email, was more like sending it in an envelope (yes I know an envelope or insecure encryption can be bypassed easily but it stops casual inspection).
We'd think someone a bit odd if they insisted that all mail to and from them, even love letters, bills, and financial statements had to be sent as postcards rather than in an envelope.
And yet, many at the time thought it odd that anyone would go to the trouble of encrypting email unless they had some deep dark secret to hide.
The history of email was such that we trained ourselves to not use the equivalent of envelopes.
Because of that, encrypting common messages that aren't among accepted sensitive categories seems odd. In truth, it would be better to have encryption be by default and unencrypted be the oddity. That way truly sensitive information wouldn't be flagged as interesting because they were encrypted.
My favorite is the posts about how you create a hidden subdirectory with files that have child porn names like, "9yr_old_girl_first_time_anal". The FBI has to view the file, only to find a video with a 10 hour long loop of some hilarious shit like He-Man Master of the Universe in the gayest music video ever.
Of course, the real joke being the policy that the FBI has to actually inspect all 10 hours of a footage, lest some clever pedophile hide the video 2/3rds of the way in, interlaced in the frames like something from the movie Contact.
I figure wasting a TB on nested TrueCrypt containers, all with stuff of that nature, plus inane bullshit like cook books, could keep the FBI busy for months on end.... even if they got the keys from me.
Then of course I realize, the joke would also be on us. The FBI would go to the Senate and demand 50 billion dollars to increase their task force and processing power to actually comply with something so fucking ridiculous. We would pay for the joke in our taxes. It's not like they would learn anything, or get a clue right?