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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?
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.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
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.
So basically your stance is - if you mail a letter in a sealed envelope, it's fair game, but if the letter is written in code, it's not.
Strange philosophy you have there.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
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.
Really. Carnivore has been around for 15 years.
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.
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.