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Google Pushing Back On Law Enforcement Requests For Access To Gmail Accounts
Virtucon writes "Ars technica has an interesting article on how Google is handling requests from law enforcement for access to Gmail accounts. With the recent Petraeus scandal where no criminal conduct was found, it seems that they're re-enforcing their policies and standing up for their users. 'In order to compel us to produce content in Gmail we require an ECPA search warrant,' said Chris Gaither, Google spokesperson. 'If they come for registration information, that's one thing, but if they ask for content of email that's another thing.'"
Email and other services are way more robust when there are many providers, because there is not one central point for a government to apply pressure. In the 1990s everyone got email through their ISP, and there were a million little ISPs all around.
Now, there are fewer ISPs, and even though they all still provide email via the standardized protocols, everyone ignores that and uses webmail... and most of them use Google. Having the whole world's email in one place is a bad idea. It means there's one place to, say, block encryption if the powers-that-be decide they really should be able to read *every* email. It means there's just one place to censor. Just one place to move away from standard protocols to achieve lock-in.
The entire concept of the internet was about decentralization to achieve robustness. Once, robustness in the face of nuclear war, but it also provides other kinds of robustness, like robustness against censorship, against control, and against monitoring. Now, for some bewildering reason, we want to discard the robustness of decentralization and put all our eggs in one basket. I do not understand why everyone prefers that.
I don't think it's a dupe, granted I have only read both summaries and neither article, but the links are different and the headline text is certainly not the same. Two "Google Saves Your Privacy Heroically" articles in as many days, though. You would think they were trying to tell us something.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Contents are private, post office does not read it, and you need a warrant from a court to intercept and read mail, so google demands a warrant for contents of email. OK fine.
Now, in each letter, the from address and the to address are open in the public. Technically the post office could build a graph of who communicates with who and how frequently using just the public information. But it is expensive, painful and so USPS does not do it. Or I think it does not do it. But it is trivial for gmail to build all people who correspond with me, and rank them by the frequency of communication. In fact it already does, it suggests a CC list based on the addresses in the To list. Is it considered public information? Would google share it with the government without warrant? Or would it require a warrant?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Patriot Act federal requests do not require a warrant and cannot be reported when served against a company like Google when serviced. Even A fast Google search reveals dozens of specific instances of Patriot Act abuse, and the law itself at http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/patriot/ shows that it wildly exceeds any sane Constitutional interpretation.
Similar abusive laws in other countries mean that Google, forced to follow local law enforcement in numerous countries, is wide open to abusive but legal requests for private content. There seems to be no sign that they do more than provide more than the slightest lip service to genuine privacy concerns, and many of their business modes are based on *selling* information about their customers.
Not "Patriot Act", it's the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, and each of those letters stands for something, because US civil defense policy is now run by the marketing arm of Mattel.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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