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Texas Poised To Pass Unprecedented Email Privacy Bill
An anonymous reader writes "A bill has reached the desk of Texas Governor Rick Perry that would give stronger privacy protections to email accounts than exist in any other state. If Perry signs it (or simply declines to veto it before June 16th), the legislation would force law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before reading somebody's email, even if the email has been sitting on the server for a long time. 'As we've noted many times before, there are no such provisions in federal law once the e-mail has been opened or if it has been sitting in an inbox, unopened, for 180 days. In March 2013, the Department of Justice acknowledged in a Congressional hearing that this distinction no longer makes sense and the DOJ would support revisions to ECPA.' This bill passed the state legislature unanimously. The article points out that the legislation won't protect from federal investigations, but it will set a precedent that the U.S. Congress will surely notice. An attorney with the EFF said, 'It's significant as proof that privacy reform is not only needed, but also politically-feasible with broad bipartisan support. And hopefully that will impact federal ECPA reform efforts by getting people on both of sides of the political aisle to work together to make meaningful electronic privacy reform a reality. The more states that pass similar legislation, the more pressure it will put on Congress to keep up with the changing legal landscape.'"
Lots of folks like to mis-characterize Texas and Texans, but as a foreigner they seem to be doing plenty of things right. Their state economy is not borked like California, they have low tax, they value individual rights more than overbearing 'nanny' governance, and they have good political leadership. Ted Cruz for Prez 2016 would not be a bad choice it seems - he's very smart and would stop the current rot in DC.
This act is of historic significance for three reasons: One, it protects the privacy of Texas citizens when they're communicating using email. Two, it requires the government to get a search warrant. And three... uh oh, email privacy, search warrant, what was the third one again? Email privacy was one...
If a privacy bill makes it harder to catch corrupt legislators, then you can be pretty sure it is going to pass.
Something Texas has done that I think is actually a pretty sensible idea? What... what have I become? YOU DID THIS TO ME!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"the more pressure it will put on Congress to keep up with the changing legal landscape."
Congress can't even keep it's own house in order so I won't be holding my breath for any action on this issue.
Privacy is not at the forefront of any politician's agenda that I know of, unless you can find a way to make it turn a profit, and it never will be until there's a massive breech i.e. until it's already too late.
Less *is* more.
BTW the low tax Texas is myth just look how much we pay property tax!
Well, as taxes go, property taxes come closer than most others to having the tax burden be proportional to how much it costs the government to provide services to you. I have moral problems with taxes per se, but if we have to have them, then having the amount of money you have to pay to Texas be proportional to how much you own of Texas is much better than an income tax or a sales tax.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
It's not the state that really matters but the Feds, and although these protections are nice and worth of praise, I keep all my *important* person-to-person email at a server in Switzerland with some of the toughest privacy regulations exist, and all things that are *really* important, are always, with no exception, sent and received using GPG, and retrieved via POP with nothing kept in the servers there. I'll keep my own email backups, thanks.
The funny thing is that I know I'm probably the most boring person out there with nothing important to hide, but I do it as a matter of principle, and so should you.
having the amount of money you have to pay to Texas be proportional to how much you own of Texas is much better than an income tax or a sales tax.
Yet it seems to fly in the face of "no taxation without representation".
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
There is only one possible meaning, silly-head: there is some electronic record of the message being marked "read". (And if you didn't actually read it but it got marked read by accident, tough luck; it's not their fault the computerized equivalent of tearing open an envelope and not reading the letter only takes a bit of hesitation between two keystrokes.)
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Ted Cruz was born in Canada, and therefore Constitutionally prohibited from running for President of the United States.
He was born to two American citizens, making him a naturalized citizen of the United States. That's something that the "birthers" could never quite grasp. Even if Obama had been born in Kenya, it would not have kept him from being President as his mother was an American Citizen.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
and all the ISP need to do is move the servers out of TX.
but if we have to have them, then having the amount of money you have to pay to Texas be proportional to how much you own of Texas is much better than an income tax or a sales tax.
OK...so for those working a minimum wage job trying to support a family, who own no property in Texas, you're fine with them not having to pay tax? Or are you going to call them freeloaders? or part of the 47%?
Or maybe things aren't so black-and-white?
Naturalized is different from natural born. Natural born is not actually legally defined anywhere, but the the context of historical uses does support the idea that being born of US citizens would count as natural born.
s/naturalized/natural born
You know what "naturalized" means, don't you?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
And then all you have to do is switch to an e-mail provider who values your privacy enough to not leave Texas.
And seriously, who the hell uses their ISP's e-mail service anyway? I prefer to use a service independent of my ISP, so in the likely chance my ISP pisses me off I can just tell them to fuck off and switch to a new one... and not have my e-mail communications interrupted.
US Constitution Amendment 14: "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."
There's no legitimate way that government could be reading these emails 180 days and "opened" or not without a probably cause warrant. I understand the fact is they do, so it's great that Texas is passing the law to stymie that abuse, but how is it possibly justified to begin with? It's right there plain to read. That's prohibited. Has nobody taken it to court?
"Texas! You did something right!"
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
OK...so for those working a minimum wage job trying to support a family, who own no property in Texas, you're fine with them not having to pay tax? Or are you going to call them freeloaders? or part of the 47%? Or maybe things aren't so black-and-white?
I'm fine with them not having to pay a direct tax for those services that are funded by the property tax. First, they will be paying it indirectly via the rent they pay to their landlord, just like they indirectly pay gas tax on items they buy that have been trucked to the store. Second, I would not propose having everything paid this way, just those services whose cost is (roughly) proportional to the value/size of your property -- police protection, for instance, since thieves obviously would rather rob rich people than poor people. The aforementioned gas tax is a better way to pay for roads, since (until electric cars become more popular) the amount of gas you burn is roughly proportional to how much wear and tear you inflict on the roads. That assumes that the gas tax goes only for the roads and doesn't, as it usually is now, get put into the general fund. That general fund is one of the basic problems, because it muddles the connection between what you pay and what you take.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Yes, and as a general rule, heavier vehicles consume more fuel (and so pay more taxes) per mile driven.
Wear and tear on roads is more related to the pressure the vehicle places on the road. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating
Yes, but in general, the heavier the vehicle, the more gas it burns. And the more it is driven, the more gas it burns. So, a per-unit tax on fuel is roughly proportional to weight times miles. You could certainly come up with a more precise measure, but this seems a good enough approximation to me, without having to actually monitor the vehicle's activity.
A general fund is not a problem anymore than insurance is a problem because it pools risks from many, and that many pay for the few.
Except that your car insurance is separate from your health insurance, both of which are separate from your home insurance, etc. And for each one, the amount you have to pay is based on the probable amount that you will receive. That is how I am saying taxes vs. government spending should work. If you have a more expensive car, you pay higher car insurance rates, and if you have more property attracting thieves, your contribution to police funding should be higher. But just because you make more money doesn't mean you should be made to pay for, say, a public pool which you may never use. That's what entrance fees are for.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
That's cool. So Texas charges property tax on property outside of real estate, like stocks and bonds and intellectual "property"?
If you mean do they now, I don't think so. If you mean should they according to what I said before, then no. If you own a stock, you own part of a company, not part of Texas.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Is there a law (natural or man-made) to say: you get the amount of representation is a proportion of the paid taxes?
Just s/taxes/campaign contributions/g, and there is.
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There is only one possible meaning, silly-head: there is some electronic record of the message being marked "read".
You're probably right, but it makes no sense. If you receive a letter and open it, that doesn't give the government the right to read it. The lack of protection for email is completely at odds with the Supreme Court's usual "reasonable expectation of privacy" requirement.
One of the things I like about a tax revenue solely coming from sales tax is that all the goods and services that use public property and services are taxed according to their use. Your good needs to be shipped, sales tax on gasoline pays for the road, you want the police and fire fighters to protect your property, the sale tax on land and construction pays for that, as long as no exemptions are used for taxes it remains very simple. There is no ambiguity on how much something should be taxed either, as with property tax, where the government appraiser chooses how much taxes you should pay and is influenced by factors that don't include the actual value of the property.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Opening an email and then leaving it on the server (as most people do) is like opening a letter and then leaving it open, taped to your mailbox outside. Anyone walking down the street can then read it, including the government.
When email worked the way it use to, and you use to download it from the server and removed it from the server - that would be like you take a letter into your house, and then read it, and keep it inside your house. THEN you could expect privacy. But the way the majority of people use email changed, yet people still expected the same amount of privacy - which isn't reasonable.
If anybody has something to hide no doubt most congress members do. Maybe they should be all for privacy in order to keep their own skeletons closeted!
Opening an email and then leaving it on the server (as most people do) is like opening a letter and then leaving it open, taped to your mailbox outside. Anyone walking down the street can then read it, including the government.
No it isn't. You've stretched that metaphor too far. You can't read someone else's email (even if it's left on the server (a la IMAP)) without cooperation from the provider or directly hacking the account.
A better metaphor is a PO box. Previously, stuff left in a PO box for 180 days is arguably abandoned. However, now the PO box company has upgraded their service to treat the PO box more like a locker (IMAP), where you can store your stuff and access it when you want it. It's no longer reasonable to say that stuff left in a locker that you frequently use is abandoned after 180 days.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Read the article. The law does NOT apply to federal authorities. That's why Holder is enthusiastically supporting it.
And of course, there's no restriction against the FBI reading Texans' emails and then passing the info on to local Texas law enforcement...
And since Texas has essentially no state law enforcement, this law applies only to Texas county mounties, who as we all know, are armed to the teeth with the latest most invasive ultra-high tech surveillance equipment and so pose a much graver threat to the tweets of every free-thinkin' Texan than Uncle Sam's merry band of good ol' boys: the FBI, CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA, etc, etc
Jeez. What a waste of time is the Texas legislature.
Its on the state level only. State level only... state level.
Even if the Feds find cute ways around it, and it's just a political statement, it's a damn good one. As a damnyankee I don't often say good things about Texas, but I gotta give credit where it's due. Maybe I'll even reconsider the idea of giving Texas back to Mexico.
Opening an email and then leaving it on the server (as most people do) is like...
... is like not taking explicit action to delete the email from the server.
No need for complicated analogies when the situation isn't that complicated.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Well, as taxes go, property taxes come closer than most others to having the tax burden be proportional to how much it costs the government to provide services to you.
I have a huge problem with property taxes. I rent, so I don't pay property tax, right? Wrong. My rent just went up fifty bucks a month because the tax was increased $600 yearly. And guess what? The guy on the west side seldom sees a cop, they're all over here on the east side where the violence is and where most of the burglaries and robberies are. And fires, as well -- the older a house is the more likely it will burn. Empty houses catch fire more often than occupied ones, and the unoccupied ones are in the parts of town nobody wants to live in because of the crime. So your statement about proportional to cost of government seems wrong.
But my biggest problem is that years ago, a friend's parents lost their home. They were retired, the mortgage paid off. But the housing boom/bubble raised property taxes to the point that their taxes were higher than the mortgage payments had been before it was paid off. Unable to pay the tax, the city took their home, the home they had owned free and clear for decades.
This is just wrong. Nobody should be thrown out of their home because government jacked the taxes up on it.
Sales tax is problematic too, since it is highly regressive. A poor person will pay taxes on almost all their income, because they live paycheck to paycheck. A rich person spends far less of his income than a poor person.
The graduated income tax is the only fair tax. The rich mostly benefit from government. A policman is a rich man's friend, a cop is a poor man's nightmare. The poor man gets absolutely nothing fro cops except trouble. If his house is burglarized, the cop takes a report and God help the poor sucker if there's a roachclip on the table when the cop takes the report. When the fire department extinguishes the fire in teh poor man's house, the lanlord is the one who benefits the most. When the landlord's own home catches fire, it's a lot bigger, newer, and more expensive house.
The FAA does absolutely nothing for the poor man, who doesn't fly. Only the middle class and up fly, and the middle class usually does so seldomly. The semitractors that do all the damage to roads and bridges are owned by the rich. The rich benefit the most fro taxes and should pay a higher rate.
The fact that Mitt Romney pays half the tax rate that I, a middle class man pays, is an outrage. Reagan made an enemy of me when he slashed the capital gains tax and released an orgy of hostile corporate takeovers. My employer was targeted and our hours were cut 30% so the company could fund the fight against Bain Capital, who wanted to buy it, fire us workers, and sell the assets off at a profit. That firm, and the last Republican Presidential candidate, are parasites on society. Why do we allow such outrageous behavior?
Opening an email and then leaving it on the server (as most people do) is like opening a letter and then leaving it open, taped to your mailbox outside. Anyone walking down the street can then read it, including the government.
If that is really how your email provider operates, I think you need to find a new provider. Because you are telling us that once you've read it, if you keep it on their server, you no longer need a username/password to access it.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
The "extra stretch" in s0nicfreak's metaphor is to incorporate the realities of what the law will look like in Texas if this passes. The DOJ (?) decided that a warrant isn't necessary to read e-mail. (Although I'm not sure if anyone can read it...)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
So I use my own mail server, and GMail ,and Yahoo!
If I want to access my mail virtually anywhere i can get a signal, I need something 'out there' to do it. And if the government declares that anything left on a server for more than 6 months is fair game, they are either telling me to give up on 6 month old mail if I want it to be safe from the Government's prying tentacles, or move it somewhere offline, which limits its usefulness greatly.
So why should I accept the Government's assertion of their right to access my personal communications, without a warrant or any oversight, merely because I store it somewhere they declare to be in any way accessible to them because it is remote to me?
More importantly, however, is the problem I would have securing a server of my own in an expedient and reasonable manner. I could run a server at my home, and challenge the Government's assertion that they can access *my* server just because it is accessible to me alone over the Internet. But my ISP would like to bill me a lot more money for me to do so. Why should I jump through that hoop and find, in the end, that the Government will only change their tune and declare my server is also covered by their self0asserted 'right' to read my email etc. merely because that's the way it works.
Not much different than the Government claiming that my physical postal mail is subject to inspection because it is, for some time, outside the control of both the sender and receiver. Wait, postal law mostly prevents that.
Why not extend the principles of postal law to electronic communications also?
Once again, proof the Constitution is intended to limit Government, not the people.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Thieves would not "obviously" prefer to rob rich people, because those people will have better security through dogs, alarms, safes, etc... No, the poor rob the poor again and again, and poorer neighborhoods are MUCH more likely to need constant police patrols to keep the level of riffraff low. If your argument is to make the people that benefit from it pay more for it, then you are essentially arguing for regressive taxes on police, fire departments, hospitals, schools, etc...
I'll grant you "isn't supported in law", but "isn't reasonable" seems questionable, since that's the entire point of the bill described by TFA.
Nope. Seems to me the distance of some server is no reason not to consider it one my own drives, one of my desk drawers or a folder in a file cabinet out in my garage. Whether by payment of money, or by social contract or gentleman's agreement, I'm renting such a place on some mail provider's disk drive. Opening an electronic letter is in no way equivalent to taping it to the mailbox down at the end of my driveway - I've read it and left it in my folder.
My email is not in plain sight, ever. It takes a physical act for anyone to read it, whether it be traveling along a line or sitting in a buffer as a mess of packets, or in the file folder on a drive somewhere. Somebody has to hit keys and read from a screen. When we all have computer implants, it may not be a physical act entirely but it will still be a separate volitional act to access and read my email, and still bears no resemblance to it being in plain view to the odd passerby.
If it were reasonable we wouldn't need a new bill to tell us it's reasonable.
Another way to look at it is this:
I rent an apartment. I do not own that apartment (I don't even own the furniture in that apartment, I'm renting that too) Yet after I read my mail, I put the things I want to hang onto for a while longer into a plain manila folder and leave it in the desk (which I do not own)
I would be quite angry to discover that just because my opened mail, left in a location I'm renting would be subject to searches simply because it wasn't specifically in a building which I specifically owned outright and didn't just rent/lease.
I think the fact that they can't just search a rented room without a warrant should have clued in the DoJ that a rented data storage medium should also require a warrant to search. Just because the cost to store data is very small doesn't mean that data is abandoned. I'm paying a company to archive and store it for me. I'm not paying them much (often just ad impressions), so I don't have much expectation that they will do a good job at preserving the data, but I intentionally left that data, by virtue of the fact that I didn't delete it, in their care. That they might be poor custodians of that data is irrelevant.
Every single email I intentionally do not delete is there because I want it to be there in case I desire to access it later and therefore not abandoned.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
if folks didn't think it was reasonable, nobody would be pushing such a bill.