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Ask Slashdot: Recommendations For Non-US Based Email Providers?
First time accepted submitter jlnance writes "I don't particularly like the NSA looking over my shoulder. As the scope of its various data gathering programs comes to light, it is apparent to me that the only way to avoid being watched is to use servers based in countries which are unlikely to respond to US requests for information. I realize I am trading surveillance by the NSA for surveillance by the KGB or equivalent, but I'm less troubled by that. I searched briefly for services similar to ymail or gmail which are not hosted in the US. I didn't come up with much. Surely they exist? What are your experiences with this?"
Actual communication security implies point-to-point security. In such a setting, a third-party service doesn't make any sense. Hence either what you're look for can't exist, or you won't know if it's secure.
I am using www.runbox.com myself: it's a service based in Norway, it's pretty cheap considering, they do not have any NSA-ties or the likes. I dunno what else to say about it, really, so I'll just copypaste this from their site:
Email Privacy in Norway
Some countries, especially in Europe, have a constitutional guarantee of secrecy of correspondence, wherein email is equated with letters and therefore protected from all types of screening and surveillance. In electronic communication, this principle protects not only the message contents but also the logs of when and from/to whom messages have been sent.
In Norway, freedom of expression and privacy of correspondence is governed by Article 100 and 102 of the Constitution and the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Norwegian Human Rights Act, especially Article 8: Right to respect for private and family life.
Additionally, the Personal Data Act as set forth by the Norwegian Data Inspectorate regulates collection, storage, and processing of personal data.
The Data Inspectorate was established January 1, 1980 and was among the first agencies in the world to facilitate the protection of individuals from violation of their right to privacy through processing of their personal data.
Central principles of the Norwegian data privacy regulations are:
Personal data must only be collected by private entities when consent from the user has been obtained.
Personal data must not be used for purposes inconsistent with the initial purpose of collection except with consent from the user.
Personal data must not be stored longer than required by the purpose of collection.
Personal data must be kept confidential unless required by law or court order.
Finally, the coming Data Retention Directive will soon be implemented in Norway but will only regulate electronic infrastructure providers, which Runbox is not.
You'd really rather have the KGB looking over your shoulder rather than NSA? Surely you are joking.
Since the NSA programs are designed primarily to intercept communications between US and non-US folks, if you are in the US and store your mail somewhere else you are asking the NSA to collect all of it. Today, if you are in the US and have your hosting in the US the NSA only gets the parts that go between you and someone in another country (or where you said some "interesting" thing like "that new pressure cooker that fits in my backpack for camping is the bomb". If you move your mail to another country, the NSA will be collecting it all (assuming your communications end point is still in the US). Yes, encryption, VPN, yada, yada. You really don't gain much by moving it.
it is in canada. the americans could still get to it, but at least they would need a proper canadian warrant, not just a nsa search button. i wouldn't suggest it if you plan to do crime, but if you just want basic civili liberties it is a worthwhile option.
My email server is sitting in my laundry room. I also host some message forums and picture galleries for just my family and friends. It is how I communicate with them.
Only about 1/3 of my family and friends use my server for email.... So any over seas email service is going to have the same limitation as mine. If I email my sister from my server, that email goes to gmail. So now the NSA knows what I sent to my sister.
So unless everyone you communicate with is outside of the US or on a server outside of NSA's reach, it won;t do any good.
Sorry to break it to you, but in the war against terror, the American people have lost.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax
Tuffmail was a service I chose because it was the best but it also happens to be a Canadian company.
http://www.tuffmail.com/
Domain names are relatively cheap, and hosting is relatively cheap. I go that route myself. The only people that have access to my server is the hosting company (which is no worse than Google to be honest)
if you have the means, the very best solution is to run an email server out of your home or place of business.
What you should be asking is "How do I get everyone to sign and encrypt their emails as a matter of course?"
Ultimately there are two reasons why - apart from the yuck factor, which is legitimate - why you don't want the NSA reading your email 1) If you say or do something which generates a shadow of suspicion, the probability that the Russians will act on it, to the extent of a SWAT team beating your door down and shooting your dog, is lower 2) If you are politically active, it's going to be less likely that the Russians will provide data to the FBI about your dubious activities Sure - avoiding either is a better ideal - but perversely I would prefer the KGB, unless I am resident in Russia, in which case they would be a very bad idea.
From all reports, most or all of the countries where spying occurs, despite their very vocal public outcry against what the U.S. is doing, are in fact sharing information with the U.S. government. And even if they don't, the U.S. can simply grab the data on its way out of the country to that server.
The only way to make email secure is to abandon email in favor of a protocol that supports end-to-end encryption, such as iMessage, XMPP, etc. and to tweak your centralized server and/or clients to require that end-to-end encryption be used. And even then, the metadata (who sent mail to whom) is at risk. The only way to prevent metadata from being trackable is to either develop a new system in which locating a user does not require credentials and use Tor to connect to the centralized server (e.g. use wide-area Bonjour to advertise your current IP address) or design a whole new messaging system built in a darknet.
Either way, email is and has always been just as secure as sending a postcard (which is to say, completely insecure), and cannot readily be improved upon significantly in this regard without starting over from scratch.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Many E-mail providers overseas require you to give personal information to sign up, often due to legal requirements in those countries; sometimes they verify that with a credit card number or simply by comparing your address data with government databases. Many countries (including much of Europe) also have data retention requirements and give their own police and intelligence service nearly free reign, and they may well exchange data with the US anyway, so it's not clear you're better off. And some providers of anonymous services may simply be fronts for intelligence agencies. And, of course, if the other parties to your E-mail use a US provider, your data is already available to US intelligence agencies, and your foreign E-mail account will stick out.
As an American, if you want to communicate privately, you have to use encryption, and preferably steganography. Getting an E-mail account in another country really doesn't help very much.
If you are emailing people who use GMail, Live, Yahoo, or a US ISP for their email provisioning, your emails to/from them are still tracked. So unless you're planning to drop all your US contacts as well, you're not helping yourself much.
Here in Canada we have a bigger issue -- all of our network pipes connect to the bigger pipes in the US. So even though we might be emailing a fellow Canadian from one Canadian ISP to another, the traffic still gets routed and sniffed through US servers.
The same is a problem for people in the EU -- the emails get routed through the pipes that are monitored by the UK's spy agency.
The NSA doesn't have to install backdoors on email servers to monitor you at all. And they *don't* typically make requests when they're spying on someone in particular -- they just sniff the traffic on the big data pipes directly.
And seeing as all those pipes run through the major partner countries like the UK, Australia, and the US itself, we're *all* fucked.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Try https://prism-break.org/ for some recommendations of OS, email, IM and more.
Witty signature omitted for brevity.
The NSA and all its foreign counterparts own the world, Okay, they work for the owners... But it should be clear that privacy is an illusion... Your service provider is taking up any remaining slack.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
NSA and GCHQ are also siphoning off data from the telcos (BT and others) at the telecoms servers, at which point who your email provider is becomes irrelevant. [You can assume that anything GCHQ knows, the NSA also knows]. It has also come out that BT has allowed GCHQ to tap the Transatlantic cables at the shore station in Bude, Cornwall without the knowledge or consent of several telcos that are not otherwise co-operating. So AFAIK you need either (1) a non-US non-UK telco and ISP with a routing that does not go through UK, or (2) encrypt everything.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
You should probably take into account that the few, and obviously mainly ignored, privacy protections you do have evaporate the nanosecond your communication leaves U.S. borders. Supposedly within the U.S. the NSA is limited to email metadata collection (look up the older term 'pen register' for the legal history of law enforcement access to this kind of information), but when you interact with a 'foreign agent' the sky's the limit. Ellison may have known more than we thought when he said, "You have no privacy. Get over it."
www.startmail.com -- currently in closed Beta -- and based in the Netherlands.
Securing your local data is easy, because you have end-to-end control. Securing email is complicated because you'll never be able to maintain complete control. It requires coordination and mutual understanding between you and everyone you email, and that's just not going to happen unless you're in a tightly-controlled organization and all of your communication is internal. I'm assuming you're an end-user at home, not an IT manager in a large corporate environment.
If your ISP allows it (and that's a big if in today's spam wars), you could run your own email server to host email service for yourself, your family and your friends and require SSL/TLS connections for all communication. Don't forget TrueCrypt or luks/dm-crypt for disk encryption on the server itself. But this only protects against eavesdropping and snooping for email users on your hosted service. There's basically nothing you can do about emails sent or received from outside of your own service. And then there's the assumption that email recipients inside of your hosted service will adequately secure their own devices (good luck getting grandma to use TrueCrypt).
If you can actually accomplish this, well, you have better powers of persuasion than I (my boss is a smart and tech savvy guy and I can't even convince him). Your best bet is: don't use email for anything you wouldn't want publicized.
To all the people suggesting to host your own servers in the basement: do you have the resources to challenge a FISC order? Hardly!
The second your email recipients are not on the same network, i.e. work off the same router, your communication is accessible to the spying agencies. Sure you could use PGP to encrypt your mails, but the metadata is still available. TOR is not really an option anymore.
Hosting on some provider's infrastructure is just replacing google, yahoo, with that provider. Who do you trust, and how much?
The only real solution to the issue MUST be a political solution. But good luck on that one!
If you are in the US I guess its tough luck, because if you have your email leave the US for foreign soil then it will be captured.
If you use encryption anywhere , it will be stored indefinitely until a time comes and there is sufficient computing horsepower to decode it.
I would suspect at this time that having your email sent anywhere outside your own country would trigger some scrutiny no matter where you live.
Its not always the ISP where the scavenging occurs (ie under sea cables) , satellite links.
I suppose we wont hear anymore of twitter empowering democracy articles. Nor the web as a great equalizer.
In the US this puts a whole new light on the ongoing effort to bring broadband to everyone. Not as a great educational or empowering tool for the rural on nontechnical population , but maybe more for the monitoring ability,
A coworker of mine who had terribly slow internet speeds was offered free 3 times the speed upgrade. I half joked with him that NSA techs were falling asleep monitoring him with his slow slow internet connection.
Years ago now... the first consumer device to not have an on/off switch was/is the household portable phone. That should have been a portent of things to come.
I do not feel that the this can be undone. Like Bears to honey , you cant just say stop. We sll become constant suspects of some future crime or some past minor crime that we didnt know we committed. We all become Russian in mindset where all electrical devices are suspect and monitoring is assumed the norm.
We did it to ourselves. Can you even expect the average congress critter to understand the technical aspects of the how modern communications work?
The term metadata is waved around as if it is something trivial. If you have my phone number you know who I am. If you have my MAC address you know what machine I am using and IP address. If you have my IME I number you know what cell phone I am using. This is all metadata.
Welcome my son to the machine...
The best I have found so far are Yandex from Russia and Netease 163.com from China. 163 is extremely fast if you are in China, but it has some advertising and the interface is all Chinese, so I would suggest the English version of Yandex mail instead at mail.yandex.com.
I'm planning to get a dedicated server with the state telco in Venezuela for precisely this reason. That and also run a Tinyproxy/OpenVPN and figure out WebDAV to have my own Google Drive/SkyDrive, etc. If anybody is interested just write to aclsid at 163.com.
Hushmail is one of the oldest 'secure' mail systems, and they moved out of the US specifically to avoid problems like the NSA. They're worth looking at, I guess.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I understand the desire to your email off-shore, but since the NSA claims to be looking at all foreign traffic, doesn't this mean you will be placing yourself directly in their sights? As much as I hate it, the solution to this is going to have to be a political one rather than a technical one.
This Ask Slashdot probably has something to do with lavabit shutting down http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57597954-83/lavabit-chief-predicts-long-fight-with-feds-q-a/
And they can't even talk about what exactly happened. That is just evil.
Doesnt mean MY government is empowered legally to look at ANY of my correspondence ANYWHERE in the world, without a warrant. It is explicitly forbidden to do so by the absolute highest law in the land. Until such time as the 4th is repealed, i will continue to demand that it be enforced.
Good-bye
I have tried to convince others that I regularly corespond with to use encryption but the reactioni get is either
1 I don't have anything to hide I m not interesting enough to bother. and encryption is hard
or
2 they have all of the encryption broken because I heard it from my brother who heard it from a reliable source and your explanation is to technical of why they haven't really broken it.
I have given up on trying so now I just cryptographicly sign my email so at the very least it can't be forged.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You're really advocating open source software as a way to avoid the NSA? LOL.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I'm not attempting to argue with you. The point is not what the NSA should or should not be doing, but rather about the practical considerations. On US soil, the claim is all they can gather is metadata (the SMTP envelop). Start using a foreign mail service, and it's very likely that everything after the DATA command is being stored as well.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I haven't tried it myself, but the people who sell this are well-known old school Portuguese geeks: http://www.fullmailserver.com/
That targets 1 person assumed traitor, terrorist, criminal or whatever, they don't thow a nuke into a populated city to kill just one person, or very few ones. What about US policy, where 50 civilians are killed for every terrorist?
Actually, NSA by law is allowed to intercept communications outside the United States. In fact, that's its mandate. So they don't have to be sneaky and underhanded to try and sneak around the law like the bull shit currently going on with US providers. Now using a non-US provider does mean that the intercepts have to be "on the fly", but that isn't a major problem for the NSA given the number of intercept facilities they have. To be perfectly honest, given the current state of technology, the only real protection the common citizen has is the shear volume of data involved and the fact that most people are of no interest to the government.
....people didn't use the internet for secure communication because it didn't exist.
Now that the internet useless for secure communication, it would be wise to stop using it for anything other than a smokescreen.
OTOH, tiny storage is cheap and there are plenty of places one could conceal say a MicroSD card on the PC board of ordinary consumer products. You could tuck one under the heatsink of a notebook or other location where it would pass visual inspection.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Tormail! Oh wait...
The only completely secure network communication is no network communication.
1and1.com is a US-based company, or has management staff in the United States, so that won't work.
This is what I understand:
1) The U.S. government can force any company to do anything it wants.
2) The U.S. government can demand that the company keep that secret.
3) The U.S. government can put a U.S. employee in prison if 1 and 2 are not followed.
Seems to me to be a vicious, anti-democratic government.
Well, they also believe that they can process the content if they aren't sure either the sender or receiver is a US citizen, or if they aren't sure both parties are within the US. And if they have processed and stored the content, and then later find out they shouldn't have [because both the sender and receiver are US citizens, and were within the US at the time], they believe it's OK keep the content anyway under a "good faith" exception.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
But i think the only real solution is to boycott any information services from a company with an american presence. since it doesn't fucking matter what you do if you host something off shore, all the data crossing borders is monitored and exchange between smtp servers is unencrypted. Which means there is no possibility of privacy unless EVERYONE you communicate with has mail hosted outside the USA as well and the routes don't pass through either.
The actual problem is not a technical one, its a political one, and the only ways to force change are with your wallets or with weapons, personally i'll play either game agains the USA
Which is all a violation of several of the Bill of Rights clauses. As data inspection and/or retention is not allowed by the federal government, that right is mine or my state's. (#9) BTW, that applies to mail address inspection as well.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2287932/kim-dotcom-s-prism-busting-encrypted-email-service-will-be-out-in-2014
The US government stopped worrying about the Constitution a long time ago. Just recently, they decided they had the power to mandate that every single US citizen purchase a specific product or be fined (Obamacare). But more to illustrate this, look at how the administrative branch of the government is refusing to follow laws congress implemented and how they think they can just write a new law without congress at all.
And before anyone jumps in here to defend Obama as if their world would fall apart if his name was ever tarnished, this has happened by both parties in the past starting with the civil war and become widely done since the new deal where Roosevelt ended up having a stand off with the supreme court. Obama is used only because he is the most recent president to be doing it.
Not only that but you still need to secure your message otherwise you'll have a problem with pigeon droppings.
True. That goes back to at least 1798.
Under the Constitution, the feds can tax you, or not tax you, pretty much any way they like. Paying a tax if you don't have health insurance is no more a violation of the Constitution than paying a tax if you don't have a mortgage. The ACA's mandate is bad policy, but is entirely Constitutional.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I have only recently heard about this project and haven't investigated too closely yet, but they seem to be trying to solve similar issues, and have an indiegogo campaign active:
http://www.mailpile.is/
Complexity Happens
Trust me, you don't want to have KGB looking over your shoulder.
1. All the guys here are correct, you'll need to do it yourself to be absolutely shure.
2. Nevertheless, setting up a webmail- and IMAP-server might be a bit excessive just to be a bit more secure.
Look at posteo.de:
1GB for 1 EUR per month, up to 20 GB.
They claim that they can not relate your payment to the anonymously set up account. They are allowed to throw away any data not needed for doing the billing by German law, so they do that
Your ip in the emails is replaced by the generic ip of posteo, making it harder to trace you
They claim that they do not store any access-data
You could use calendar and contacts and opt in to encrypt that data on their server
The SSL-certificates are created via open source products and signed by a rather paranoid signing-center
As of now, they seem to be trustworthy and the situation in Germany is NOT yet as bad as it is in the US. Personally, I trust them.
As an off topic sidenote:
Disadvantage for you US guys: They are using only green energy, the bastards! Actually avoiding the good and beloved fossile and nuclear energy! Impossible! Germany is doomed, our economy is doomed, we are all going to die!
SCNR, but some comments on /. about alternative energies are... amusing, at least in my book as a German...
Yes, but did you know we can take it back even further? I believe it was the second session of the first congress that gave us warrantless border searches for vessels entering and exiting the national ports. But that might be stretching it a bit.
If the tax followed the constitutional requirements for being created, I would agree with you. However, the so called tax was being called a penalty by all invested in seeing it pass supreme court muster because they know that the tax originated in the senate and the US constitution says it must originate in the house of representatives. There are limits to how the feds can tax you- or more precisely, limits to how the taxes are implemented.
http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/cypresscreek/blogs/the-supreme-court-may-yet-rule-obamacare-unconstitutional/article_9f10425c-a9dd-11e2-879c-0019bb2963f4.html
My understanding is that there is a lawsuit going forward on this attempting to make it hit as soon as the tax penalty is in force (standing). There has been talk about how the suspension of the penalty for businesses and organizations was to remove standing from the group suing but they modified their complaint to represent the people of the organization itself now.
Do you think that by opening an account outside the US will stop the NSA ? If the traffic originates from the US the NSA will capture it. Very likely they are in cahoots with serveral other governments ensuring that international traffic is captured as well...*cough* Australia, *cough* GB
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Under the Constitution, the feds can tax you, or not tax you, pretty much any way they like. Paying a tax if you don't have health insurance is no more a violation of the Constitution than paying a tax if you don't have a mortgage. The ACA's mandate is bad policy, but is entirely Constitutional.
There an important difference between a tax and a fine. What you say applies only to a tax. The bill was very clear in multiple places that the penalty was a fine, not a tax. The bill did not originate in the House, and so could not constitutionally contain a tax in the first place.
Not that it matters - the Roberts caved to personal social pressure in blatant disregard for the truth. That's hardly a new thing for the SCOUTS, this was just a very obvious and high-profile example. These days, laws the majority like by personal preference are found constitutional, and laws the majority find icky are found unconstitutional. We left the rule of law behind long before presidents started granting arbitrary wavers to laws with no constitutional basis for doing any such thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sure, you may run a mail server next to the dryer, but who knows where your mail is, or how it got there.
The internet is not about point-to-point communication. It's a *publishing* technology. The reason I can see this Slashdot page is because it was published on some servers, not sent over some secure wire to me. I click on a URL and somewhere a server sends the data comprising that page out into the net, broken up in itty-bit packets with my IP address embedded in them, and eventually they all get to me, where they are reconstructed and displayed in my browser.
Email is no different. Sure, you can use encryption. But, that's self-limiting unless the entire world knows everyone else's key, and then what good would encryption be?
Just as criminals rely on "social engineering" to get access to data, it's been used for centuries by governments and others to get access to data other people do not want them to see. No matter how anyone uses technology to secure their internet "privacy" (quotes because it's an oxymoron), you are really just depending that the folks who create the technology have not been "socially engineered".
So... if you don't want someone to find out something, don't publish it, on the net or elsewhere.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
In my world, at that point, it's just a bunch of useless wordplay..
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I hear that http://www.goatse.cx/ is offering webmail now...
This useless space for sale, inquire at front desk.
Actual communication security implies point-to-point security. In such a setting, a third-party service doesn't make any sense. Hence either what you're look for can't exist, or you won't know if it's secure.
You are correct but ONLY if you are guarding nuclear secrets or something. For joe non-terrorist, that's not an issue.
Any off shore mail server that allows secure connections, either by ssl or tls, and which stores its mail
off shore falls out of reach of that nonsense in US law that allows the government to access any mail
on a server for more than 6 months, because its "abandoned"
Further, those operators are not likely to handle ssl keys over to NSA demands, as has happened already in the US.
So people may send me mail to some ISP in Mozambique or some place pretty much out of the NSA reach, and it it far more likely to be safe sitting there on their server and accessed over ssl than having it right down the street at Google.
You don't have to make everything out to be someone keeping major corporate secrets or moving tons of drug money.
Sometimes its just a desire to be anonymous to your government. Since you posted AC, I can't understand why that point is lost on you.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I don't know if anyone else in the thread has pointed this out yet, but if you're worried about the NSA, going outside the U.S. is NOT the answer. Their mission (before the Patriot Act anyway) was to monitor ALL foreign communications, not domestic ones.
Neomailbox.net is my favorite. It's located in Switzerland, that has very strict privacy laws. It was an interesting co-incidence, that Neomailbox had part of its accounts hosted in US earlier, but in March 2013 decided to move them to Europe, because of the bad privacy atmosphere in USA. http://www.neomailbox.net/
Irrespective of what they *claim* they're entitled to do, in practice I'm sure they capture all the data that they can, all the time, and in all locations. Borders be damned.
You could try mail.ru -- a good old Russian e-mail provider. POP3 / IMAP are supported:
help.mail.ru/mail-help/mailer/popsmtp
As long as you do not send or receive top secret U.S. documents, I do not see why you should bother.
a. the fact that its encrypted flags it b. forget about searching your email for much of anything (they're working on that, but it's a hard problem...) c. you will only be able to communicate with people who can decrypt your messages
So. basically, there is little purpose in trying to go around the NSA on this. The only way to beat them is to wrangle them in legally with policy and legislation, or, (my preferred alternative) simply disband the NSA and abandon the Empire....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Doesnt mean MY government is empowered legally to look at ANY of my correspondence ANYWHERE in the world, without a warrant. It is explicitly forbidden to do so by the absolute highest law in the land. Until such time as the 4th is repealed, i will continue to demand that it be enforced.
Unfortunately unless you're user-name is your social security number they have no way of knowing which Norwegian-stored emails they're allowed to read, which brings in the "good-faith exception." The "good faith exception" is that if a government agent comes upon something interesting, it's usable in a court of law; as long as the government employee was trying to comply with the Fourth Amendment.
For example, if a cop searches your wagon because he thinks he's got a warrant for an eight-horse-wagon, and finds six Salvadorean 12-year-olds tied up in the back, the courts are not gonna give your Salvadorean pre-teens back to you just because it turns out the actual warrant was for a wagon with six horses.
The disadvantage of depending on a late 18th century document to protect your privacy in the early 21st century is that it doesn't really cover anything vaguely like signals intelligence, so the Courts are forced to rely on ridiculous analogies. Your email was stored in Norway, therefore most of the email on the server was probably Norwegians emailing other Norwegians, therefore the cops can assume on Good Faith that ALL the email on the server is not subject to the fourth amendment, therefore they don't need a US Warrant to search those emails. They may need a Norwegian warrant before the Norwegians will turn over the emails, but they do not need an American one.
Germany did something to mess up with the data of German citizens as well. I'm not exactly sure what happened but my German friend says he doesn't trust them at all since he does not believe what Merkel said about not knowing anything. Something like a govt agency was colaborating, since Germany is part of NATO after all. I think as many people said here, either roll your own server or use an e-mail of a country that is the antagonist of the country you live in.
Plus even if it is encrypted they will always get who is sending the info and who is receiving it.
The US Constitution includes an enumerated list of powers for both the Executive and the Legislative branches. This implies that no other powers are allowed the federal government. The Ninth (and Tenth as well), re-state that the Feds have no powers except those listed. Which means legally speaking the Ninth (and the Tenth) are only relevant if you can prove a given government action is not justified by some other clause of the Constitution. And if you can prove that the 9tth and 10th are unnecessary.
In other words the fact that you're quoting the Ninth at all is pretty clear evidence you have no clue what the Constitution actually means. In this case it's quite clear the government has the ability to retain data it got legally, because if it didn't it would be extremely tricky for them to run at all. For example, take the fact that Barrack Obama is President. That's data. If the feds have no power to retain legally obtained data it's illegal for them to remember that.
The problem for Fourth Amendment maximalists and email is that the Fourth Amendment predates email. This means that the only way the Courts can apply it to email is apply analogies from horse and buggy-level technology to your gmail account, and the Courts have historically not been very aggressive about 4th Amendment enforcement. For example, if a Federal official heard a wagon was smuggling fake banknotes, he had something on the order of a 99.99% chance of getting a warrant. If he "accidentally" searched the wrong wagon and found some other contraband (say some good imported without paying the proper duties) the courts would declare it was Good Faith and the poor wagon-owner would be found guilty.
Hell, today NYC's stop-and-frisk is much worse from a Fourth Amendment point-of-view, and yet it's virtually impossible to get white people to talk about it. Apparently searching black people without a warrant of any kind is perfectly fine, but reading a white guy's email with a warrant is EVIL.
Please name a proposal that has been un-done due to the origination clause.
Senators change taxes all the time, and if the Senate can;t amend a House bill that includes taxes the Senate is useless.
More to the point the US House said it passed the Bill. Part of Separation of Powers is that the Courts don't get deep into the nitty-gritty of legislative details. For example, more then once they've allowed the House to pass a Bill without voting for it on the basis that the House "Deemed it passed."
It would be a pretty big deal for them to ban ObamaCare on the basis of the origination clause.
Question:
When has the Court ever overturned a proposal on the basis of the origination clause?
Hell, why would the Court do that in this case? Several bills passed the House, including this one, all of which included the mandate. IIRC the House bill's mandate-clause was identical to the Senate bills, because the differences between the houses were largely in abortion funding and the various public option plans.
Ok, this may not be a comment that you will like, but from a different viewpoint, what you are asking could be interpreted as "How can I go infest and contaminate an erstwhile quiet place, bringing all my paranoia, war mentality and trash with me just do I don't have to live with the mess that me and my society created? I would hate to stay right where I am and peacefully, stubbornly work at changing things I don't like. That sounds like hard work." You think that the NSA doesn't have the capability to trace you to Mars if they wanted to? And the problem when they do that is that they will infiltrate and pollute yet another foreign site that could have done with that undue intrusion, thank you very much.
Name me one that has happened in violation of the origination clause. That you will find has never happened that we know about until they attempted to snake the obamacar bills through.
Stop being stupid. It does nothing to advance your cause. Of course the senate has the ability to purpose changes to bills sent over by the house even if they include taxes or changing the amount taxed. That is not what happened here.
Actually, no it would not be a big deal. At least no bigger of a deal then declaring what was presented as a penalty and argued to be valid as a penalty was actually a tax and valid as a tax. It would be no bigger of a deal then the Supreme Court ruling that Obama's appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Board were unconstitutional and reversing every decision they had been a part of.
It would not be a big deal at all. It would actually restore some confidence in our system and likely strengthen the trust in government at the same time.
Reread the origination clause. The senate "may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills".
That's exactly what happened. Both houses introduced the legislation at once (ie: they "proposed it" at the same time), both houses extensively amended it, and the house went with the Senate version. In legal terms that counts as the House "originating" the bill and then going along with the Senate Amendments.
Note that pretty much every revenue bill ever passed has gone through this exact process. Most of them don't end with the house agreeing to the entire Senate bill, but over the years the Senate bill has been the primary source of the final bill quite often.
If that was what happened, then all is ok. But that is not what happened and the link showed it. However, you arguing whatever is pointless as I'm not the one taking it to court and you will not be sitting on the court deciding over the case.
And constitutionally, that cannot happen because the senate is only allowed to amend or change the house version when it pertains to taxes then the house has to vote on it again to approve of those changes or reject it outright.
Nope, I can find no other bill that has done this when it comes to taxes being raised. The democrat leadership at the time knew the house wouldn't go along with this and they did a process called reconciliation in which house and senate bills are reconciled together to form a complete bill that has been agreed on. Except that the process violated the house's own rules because it wasn't able to do that according to the rules in place if it involved manipulating revenue. This rule is in place specifically because of the constitutionality of the process.
The court would only care if we were a nation of laws. That was sort of my point. The SCOTUS these days seems to rule on the basis of "hey, I (dis)like the intent of this law, and that constitution thingy is just a technicality to be reasoned around". And since they're very smart guys, they can always reason around the "constitution" obstacle.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The US Constitution includes an enumerated list of powers for both the Executive and the Legislative branches. This implies that no other powers are allowed the federal government. The Ninth (and Tenth as well), re-state that the Feds have no powers except those listed. Which means legally speaking the Ninth (and the Tenth) are only relevant if you can prove a given government action is not justified by some other clause of the Constitution.
Actually, I don't have to prove that the government is not justified. The government needs to prove that it is justified. A minor difference, but the onus is on the government.
And if you can prove that the 9tth and 10th are unnecessary.
The 9th and 10th (which some how I edited out of the original posting) were only needed because of the first 8 amendments. The founders wanted to be clear that enumerating rights for the people and the states in no way limited their rights to only those 8. Their primary focus was on limiting the power of the federal government itself.
In other words the fact that you're quoting the Ninth at all is pretty clear evidence you have no clue what the Constitution actually means. In this case it's quite clear the government has the ability to retain data it got legally, because if it didn't it would be extremely tricky for them to run at all.
It's quite clear you are attributing statements that I did not make, and your strawman doesn't make your case either. This is my data, or a company's data. It's not government data in any way, shape, or form. The government doesn't generate it, doesn't operate on it, doesn't require it. The only thing they do is tax revenue flows. They do not need access to lower level data, ever, for any of those reasons. For other reasons, there are warrants which can grant them access when there is a need, along with a paper trail documenting that need.
This means that the only way the Courts can apply it to email is apply analogies from horse and buggy-level technology to your gmail account, and the Courts have historically not been very aggressive about 4th Amendment enforcement.
If you'll note, the founders were careful in their phrasing precisely to not limit it to strawmen such as your horse and buggy example. "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" except "Warrants" issued only "upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" which is why evidence of a different crime found during a warrant cannot generally be used by the court. Nothing there about horses and buggies, nor mail nor email for that matter.
Hell, today NYC's stop-and-frisk is much worse from a Fourth Amendment point-of-view, and yet it's virtually impossible to get white people to talk about it. Apparently searching black people without a warrant of any kind is perfectly fine, but reading a white guy's email with a warrant is EVIL.
Now I'd agree that stop and frisk under your guise is a bad thing, but generally the officer has observed something to cause it, Or so goes the statements. The TSA, however, has no such thing, and their searches are patently a violation of the 4th, besides being relatively ineffective given what has passed through their sieve of a gauntlet.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'm beginning to think you're a troll, and your entire job is to prove ObamaCare is Constitutional, because you really suck at this. You just don't seem to be familiar with any actual facts.
Reconciliation happens with every bill that either House amends. It is the process by which the House approves Senate amendments, or vice versa. Reconciliation is not against the House rules, it is the House rules. It involves having both houses vote on the final, reconciled, proposal that their committee has come up with.
Reconciliation did not happen in this case because the vote on a reconciled bill can be filibustered, and between final passage of ObamaCare in the Senate and the start of the reconciliation process Scott Brown got himself elected. This cut the Democratic majority to 59 in the Senate, so no reconciled bill could pass, so they did an end run around the process.
The end run was they just had the House pass the Senate bill. The final vote was 219-212, and was very much in doubt because a group of pro-life Dems, led by Bart Stupak, wanted much stronger rules preventing tax money from funding abortions. Moreover Kucinich refused to support a bill that did not include a strong public option. Both Stupak and Kucinich ended up voting for the bill.
So the House proposed the mandate, it voted on it;s version of the mandate, and then it voted on the Senate version of the mandate. You ain't gonna convince a Court that ObamaCare is invalid because the House didn't vote on it.
The US Constitution includes an enumerated list of powers for both the Executive and the Legislative branches. This implies that no other powers are allowed the federal government. The Ninth (and Tenth as well), re-state that the Feds have no powers except those listed. Which means legally speaking the Ninth (and the Tenth) are only relevant if you can prove a given government action is not justified by some other clause of the Constitution.
Actually, I don't have to prove that the government is not justified. The government needs to prove that it is justified. A minor difference, but the onus is on the government.
True, but given that it's a list of powers, there isn't much difference there.
Somebody's gonna have to go through the list, one by one, eliminating things.
And if you can prove that the 9tth and 10th are unnecessary.
The 9th and 10th (which some how I edited out of the original posting) were only needed because of the first 8 amendments. The founders wanted to be clear that enumerating rights for the people and the states in no way limited their rights to only those 8. Their primary focus was on limiting the power of the federal government itself.
I will admit the 9th isn't a total waste of space in theory. After all, theoretically somebody could think of a right that Englishman had that isn't on the list of the Bill of Rights. In practice it's been 224 years and nobody's thought of one. This argument (for example) is entirely based on the 4th Amendment, and the 9th has (to my knowledge) never been cited by any Court at any level for any reason.
The 10th is about as useful. So far it's been ruled a "truism" by the Supremes. It is cited in case law when the Feds try to force states to enforce Federal law, but that only happens once every 20-30 years.
In other words the fact that you're quoting the Ninth at all is pretty clear evidence you have no clue what the Constitution actually means. In this case it's quite clear the government has the ability to retain data it got legally, because if it didn't it would be extremely tricky for them to run at all.
It's quite clear you are attributing statements that I did not make, and your strawman doesn't make your case either. This is my data, or a company's data. It's not government data in any way, shape, or form. The government doesn't generate it, doesn't operate on it, doesn't require it. The only thing they do is tax revenue flows. They do not need access to lower level data, ever, for any of those reasons. For other reasons, there are warrants which can grant them access when there is a need, along with a paper trail documenting that need.
It's not my fault you weren't clear that you were talking about personal data. It's not like there's a specific Constitutional clause that the government is allowed to collect any data, that's an implicit power.
For what the NSA say they do, they have warrants or don't need warrants because they're 51% sure the target is not a US Citizen. I don't think it's a particularly good idea for the NSA to troll the internet for evil Canadians, but this discussion isn't about what the NSA has a moral right to do, it;s about what the NSA has a legal right to do. And the Courts have very consistently ruled that if an officer of the law is pretty sure he doesn't need a warrant, based on evidence that would convince a reasonable person he probably doesn't need a warrant, he doesn't need a warrant.
It's possible Snowden's right and they're lying. But most of Snowden's most outrageous accusations have already been shown to be false. He could not access data directly from google's servers, he could not read your email in real-time, etc. IMO it's 50-50 who is full of shit on this one.
This means that the only way the Courts can apply it to email is apply ana
It would help to speak, or at least read, Russian while signing up. I don't recall there having been an English-language option during the set up, though there may be this-decade.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Let's not get into delusional fantasies. I said no such thing, I said people are saying it and people are suing over it. But this brings up an interesting note. If what I said makes you think Obamacare is unconstitutional, then perhaps you should explore that Idea in and of itself as it is your idea.
Reconciliation is a specific process- rule in the house pertaining to budgetary items. It involved removing amendments passed in one house that the other won't pass and pulls the bills together insomuch as they are the same as has been voted on. What you say is true in the generic sense of how legislation works, but has no meaning whatsoever at all when talking about this because the main difference is whether or not the two bills need to be voted on again after then have been reconciled. In the normal process, the new bill would need a vote. What happened here is the senate voted on one bill, the house voted on another, those separate and different bills passed, then the senate changed bills and instead of voting again, they removed the differences as if they had bother been passed. The house rules allow that to happen as long as it doesn't increase taxes or spending.
The rest of your comment is meaningless. It talks about before the bills currently called Obamacare was voted on, not what happened when the bills finally went to the president.
read that link I posted.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/31/obamacare-lawsuit-over-health-care-tax-will-test-c/?page=all
Re-read your source. They're not arguing the bill didn't start in the House. They're arguing it doesn't count as a "revenue bill Originating in the House" because the House bill it started as wasn't a Revenue Bill. They also aren't arguing that they'll win on the merits, they're arguing John Roberts will change his mind on the Constitutionality of the entire bill, and use this opportunity to knock it out.
There's a reason nobody made this argument, despite the fact that the Mandate-Tax was not the only tax in the bill. There's the Cadillac Tax, investment income tax hikes, Medicare payroll tax hikes, etc.
They're quite open that this isn;t a serious legal argument, it's a political effort to get Roberts to change his mind.
Yes, that reason is because you cannot argue standing against a tax that you are not yet subject to. You have to show injury in fact in your standing and until the tax impacts you, that has not happened.
Roberts will not change his mind if there is no legal backing for it. None of the judges will support the concept if it isn't legally sound. You seem to be reading too much into what was said. Roberts said the penalties were taxes because they were essentially taxes laid in a reverse order. Once those taxes have an impact on someone, standing to sue over the process they became law becomes possible.
Anyways, it isn't my argument, it is an argument being made and it will end up at the supreme court unless they refuse to hear it.
The indoor tanning tax was implemented pretty much the day the law was signed (mid-2010). Final regulations on it took awhile (they were just issued this month), but everyone whose paid to use a tanning bed since 2010 has been required to pay the tax.
Lawyers are very good at thinking of credible-sounding BS. Many, man law school classes include a section where the prof presents a case, asks everyone to argue about it, and then makes the winner of the debate take the opposite side. This case is a bunch of very smart conservative lawyers grasping at straws to kill ObamaCare.
The started as a House Bill, HB 3590. Since origination is never defined in the Constitution these conservatives made up a definition that doesn't include it. Unfortunately for them nobody outside of their tiny anti-ObamaCare circle is gonna take their definition of "Origination" very seriously because it's just that: their definition. The people who actually matter in these things are the US House, which did not object to the Senate bill. Seperation of Powers means the Courts only intervene in the other branches interpretation of their particular Constitutional clauses in cases where those branches are seriously violating somebody's rights.
That's why nobody who paid the Tanning Tax sued on the basis ObamaCare was Senate-originated and therefore not allowed to have taxes in it. What's gonna happen is the District Court will refuse to rule, probably on the basis that the origination clause is only the Judicial branch's business if it's being abused to oppress religious minorities (First Amendment) or racial minorities (14th and 15th Amendments); they'll appeal to the Appeals Court, which will refuse to ruls on the basis of "Fuck you asshole," and then the Supremes will ignore them.
Ok, who was subject to the tax that wanted to end obamacare but did not attempt it? Just because someone was taxes doesn't mean the person wanting to challenge the tax was the one taxed.
Then put all your mental might into a legal brief and submit it to the courts hearing this. As I said, it's being challenged and you not liking it doesn't change that fact. I am quite positive that if there was no merit, it would have been dismissed or will be before it gets any steam. The fact that it hasn't lends me to believe you are wrong.
Remember, people have paid taxes without objection even when later those taxes have been rescinded because of constitutionality. Just because no one has argued about a certain tax because a legal theory fites does not mean the theory is defective, it means no one has argued it. And as I said before, it's up to the courts, I think it has more merit then you do but we will have to wait and see.