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US DOJ Say They Don't Need Warrants For E-Mail, Chats
gannebraemorr writes "The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don't need a search warrant to review Americans' e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files, internal documents reveal. Government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET show a split over electronic privacy rights within the Obama administration, with Justice Department prosecutors and investigators privately insisting they're not legally required to obtain search warrants for e-mail."
Keep knock'n back that cool-aid
to be watched by the Government.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Does the same logic mean that the government can not reject FOI requests for emails and can not redact anything in emails?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Maybe we should create an amendment to the constitution that makes this issue more clear regarding illegal search.
Oh, wait... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
well then maybe we should create a law that clarifies the position a bit further
Oh, wait.. http://www.justice.gov/opcl/privstat.htm
ok, well maybe we will have courts decide that emails are personal property
Oh, wait... http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_emails_personal_property
when/where does it end?
If you can sniff the network and easily read what I sent then fine. If I secure my emails so they don't appear in plain text then I think you do. If you secure your communication then you should require a warrant, because otherwise anyone could read what I send and I should have no expectation of privacy with my communications.
People keep claiming that they want to keep their guns because they need to protect themselves if their rights are taken away by the government...
HELLO???? At what point do you start defending yourselves? Your rights are being slowly stripped away and have been over the course of the last 30 years, and nobody does anything?
Even when the Stormtroopers are patrolling the streets, and curfew after dark is in place and people are afraid to speak against the government, or talk on their phones, with your neighbors turning each other in for 'treason'... you'll all still be sitting on your guns waiting for the government to take away your rights.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
things like policies on "unopened" email older than 180 days. Are we talking about the 'seen' flag being set? or the file being opened? yeah, of course government law enforcement agencies want the power to snoop on this kind of stuff but it sounds like theyre doing it without a warrant to get around the fact that most judges are completely ignorant about email and electronic communication.
then again judges have ruled in the past the FBI does not have this kind of broad jurisdiction to warrantlessly read email, so maybe they really are just ignoring the rulings?
either way, its been proven by multiple school shootings and a recent bombing that spy-on-the-whole-country technology is worthless. it doesnt help anyone prevent or prove crime, it only enables precrime and thoughtcrime to be used as fodder for law enforcement careers and budget proposals.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Cue the flamebait accusations....
I'm can't disagree with the U.S. Government's position on this one. If data is sent via the Internet, the world's biggest public network, and isn't encrypted, then why should anybody need anything to read it? Unreasonable search and seizure doesn't apply when one person is talking to another person on a street corner...or on the world's biggest public network.
Encrypt your messages and then an argument can be made for 4th Amendment violations.
"Pentagon spokesman George Little said, 'We have repeatedly stated that . . . our forces were unable to reach it in time to intervene to stop the attacks.'
These are essentially the same people who had solid intel that could have prevented the 9/11/2001 attacks, but did nothing with it.
Considering recent history, believing a word these vile fucks say is suckerdom to the n-th degree.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Bullshit, the test is and always has been what a reasonable person assumes, and a reasonable person assumes their personal communications between themselves and a second party are not being eavesdropped, recorder, or otherwise sifted through by their government without a warrant! If we are to pervert the basic tenants of the constitution and the bill of rights to what it is possible for a modern surveillance state to achieve then we should just scrap this government and start over.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yes, those all apply to email in your possession. But, not necessarily to those stored with third parties. It's called the Third Party Doctrine.
http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question_should_the_third-party_records_doctrine_be_revisited/
In essence, the doctrine holds that information lawfully held by many third parties is treated differently from information held by the suspect himself. It can be obtained by subpoenaing the third party, by securing the third party’s consent or by any other means of legal discovery; the suspect has no role in the matter, and no search warrant is required.
If data is sent via the Internet, the world's biggest public network, and isn't encrypted, then why should anybody need anything to read it? . . .
Encrypt your messages and then an argument can be made for 4th Amendment violations.
You're not distinguishing between data in transit and data at rest. And it's an important distinction. Using Google's mail service as an example, my gmail is encrypted in transit via SSL. Always. I use HTTPS-Everywhere plugin to ensure that.
That said, I don't know how Google stores it while it rests on their servers, but it is in that state that the government claims they have a right to inspect it without a warrant. I hope it's encrypted, but it's not under my direct control. And it sounds like government is insisting Google not only give them access but share any keys they use to encrypt the data at rest. That means, if it is encrypted on their servers, that only helps protect it from hackers and accidental disclosure, not from authorized (by Google) agents.
The solution, as you hinted at, would be to encrypt your messages with something like PGP or GnuPG before sending them (in transit) or storing them (at rest) in either your or the recipient's mailbox. That puts the encryption keys squarely under your control, and makes the stored ciphertext inaccessible to the government, but comes with its own usability and key management issues. It's not something your everyday user is going to be comfortable with.
I don't believe that should mean that the less technically adept experience less privacy, but that's just my humble opinion...
Really. Carnivore has been around for 15 years.
When your government starts telling you that, it is a sign that you are having a crisis and need to swap out your government for a new one before it becomes impossible to do so.
It may already be too late.
Corporations are people, humans aren't.
Money is speech, writing isn't.
Democracy has sold out.
Didn't you get the memo?
movetoamend.org if you don't like it.
Obama supports Holder completely.
Until Holder does something REALLY unpopular, then it's "The Buck Never Got Here"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The DoJ is the logical equivalent of the local cops. They are the 'hired muscle' used to bring suspects before the court system for trial and to prosecute them (represent the public's case in criminal trials). They don't make the law. Nor do they apply it to individual cases.
Of course, the cops are going to claim as much power as they can get away with.
Have gnu, will travel.
As a Democrat who follows the standard array of leftie fora, I can assure you that (1) nobody in the progressive, activist core of the party likes Holder even slightly, and (2) the majority of us are quite open about it. That includes not a few of us who on balance like his boss.
As for our Democratic senators, too many of them are old, coming from a time when success in politics required bowing to "law and order." And a number of them were prosecutors in their younger life. Younger Democrats are, almost across the board, left-libertarian and wish Holder were impeached as a traitor to the Constitution. In his earlier career he was a lawyer serving the big investment banks. He still is. We're all shamed by him.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
All we need is email programs that perform a Diffie-Hellman key exchange during the first few emails you exchange with anybody
As always, the hardest part of practical cryptography is key management. What you are talking about is opportunistic encryption. It won't actually prevent decryption but it will force the attacker to do an active Man-In-The-Middle attack, which can be detected after the fact.
This should be the default mode of operation for PGP mail. Whenever you send an email it should append your public key into the headers. As soon as your interlocutor responds, he can encrypt his reply and sign with his own public key, so all messages but the first one are encrypted. It should just work, nothing should be exposed to the user except a small keylock, which he can click if he's so inclined and verify things like key thumbprint etc. to detect tampering and/or explore full PGP functionality.
For an environment such as webmail, this still offers zero security: you either keep the private key on the server, or you do the encryption operations on the clients's side. Since Javascript run-time a href=http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/>is malleable it's very easy to retrieve the private key or the plain text back from the user when the government asks you.
The gun issue not withstanding, the Government's attack on the Second Amendment is horrific and sets up really bad precidence for the Fourth Amendment, First Amendment, as well as others.
FOURTH AMENDMENT
Just think: In order to exercise your Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure, the Government needs to perform a background check on you to ensure that you are an upstanding citizen.
FIRST AMENDMENT
In order to exercise your First Amendment rights, you are subject to a three day waiting period. You may only use media types approved by the Government. Discourses conducted through media not sanctioned is a felony.
etc.