Senate Advances Plan To Make Email and Social Sites Report Terror Activity

Advocatus Diaboli sends news that the Senate Intelligence Committee has unanimously approved draft legislation that would requires email providers and social media sites to report any suspected terrorist activities to the government. While the legislation itself is classified until it reaches the Senate floor, Committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) said, "America’s security depends on our intelligence community’s ability to detect and thwart attacks on the homeland, our personnel and interests overseas, and our allies. This year’s legislation arms the intelligence community with the resources they need, and reinforces congressional oversight of intelligence activities." The legislation is based on 2008's Protect Our Children Act, which required companies to report information about child porn to an agency that would act on it. One industry official told the Washington Post, "Considering the vast majority of people on these sites are not doing anything wrong, this type of monitoring would be considered by many to be an invasion of privacy. It would also be technically difficult."

Comments

I hereby announce my plans for terrorism

[Anonymous Coward]

I will dump tea in Boston Harbor, while dressed as an Indian, feather, not dot, and I will then follow it up by riding a horse to Lexington and Concord.

Re:I hereby announce my plans for terrorism

[LifesABeach]

It sorrows me to inform the DOJ, but the Senate Intelligence Committee are a terrorists organization. Their anti american activities to abolish the 1st Amendment is throughly unignoreable.

And what if those rag headed cock suckers have a valid point? What then?

Re:I hereby announce my plans for terrorism

[dbIII]

Considering Senator Peter T. King (New York) proudly supported the IRA (including financially) when it was blowing up people in England and he's a prominent member of that committee things are ridiculous.

I define terror ...

[PPH]

... as someone operating outside the purview of our court system running around threatening me with prison time should I fail to hand over my data.

And how are they going to do this?

[GrandCow]

Do they expect email providers to flag every email with keywords in it? Because I'm sure they'll love hearing about all the bath bombs people order. Or the new version of death and decay from warcraft patch notes.

You'd think any kind of organized terrorist would use codewords and not actually write an email saying "the bomb will be placed at and it's set to blow up at 3:00pm, We expect 100+ deaths"

Re:And how are they going to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, people who encrypt their emails will be reported instantly.

Re:And how are they going to do this?

[gstoddart]

Yes, essentially they want ISPs to be responsible for policing what we do, and handing it over -- for now if it's terrorism, eventually for anything else they can think of.

What they're saying is sites should be monitoring our activities to report us to the authorities.

They have coopted the internet, and essentially turned it into the thought police. They've basically privatized the surveillance state.

America has finally reached the point of turning into bad cyberpunk, and people are saying yes.

Papers, please, comrade. Anything you say will be used against you.

The scope creep of pretty much everything draconian and fascist will pretty much start coming true if they can get enough popular support.

Re:And how are they going to do this?

[I'm New Around Here]

Achmed, stop giving away our secret code.

Re:And how are they going to do this?

[ancientt]

So you're the reason grandma's birthday was so exciting!

Re:And how are they going to do this?

[IamTheRealMike]

Same way it works for banks. In other words, it doesn't, but it makes them into awfully convenient scapegoats who can be blamed for any social ill on the grounds that "they could have stopped it but didn't because they're all greedy capitalists".

It was inevitable that things would go this way the moment encryption started getting good. As NSA/GCHQ are now much more limited in what they can see, and privacy advocates are trying to stop them getting more power, the obvious 'solution' is to outsource the costs to the private sector. The advantage is the government can then never screw up, except by being insufficiently aggressive with them. It's a lose/lose situation for anyone who runs a communications system.

And the only solution to THAT is end to end crypto so not even the provider can read the messages. Hence the UK's sudden interest in banning such systems entirely.

This will never work...

[bobbied]

But the politicians won't care, they will all be seen as "doing something" by passing another law that purports to fix something. All they will really accomplish is leveling undue hardship on E-mail and social sites and get a flood of useless information nobody at the NSA is prepared to deal with. Well, that and driving business off shore where they have no rights to force the collection of any data.

Hey, bone heads, stop messing with stuff you don't understand... Didn't the ACA teach you anything? Besides, if you wanted to do something like this, why in the blazes did we give up control of the top level domain servers?

Re:Pull a what?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, didn't misspell. Clinton is the one who ran her own server from home and trashed the data AND server when asked for it..knowingly. Even if other POS elected representatives wiped data from state servers it doesn't diminish the fact that Hillary did it AFTER she was told to give up the goods, hence my original comment and your moronic response that had nothing to do with it, but I shouldn't be surprised from this sites; liberal readers.

Re:Good thing ...

[Trachman]

You are ultimate fool thinking that the appetite of data gathering (spying) organizations is somehow limited to the servers that are stationed in US.

You are double the fool thinking that the government was doing kill US tech business: the truth is these two were adulterers all the times while on surface pretending to be independent. Some Companies even had the guts to state that they are "committed to the privacy" and "fighting the government" ("google and yahoo). The truth is that not only they were adulterers, but more like fused cojoined twins where government and corporations. There is another term that, look it up.

Terrorists

[penguinoid]

Terrorists are attacking our homeland, reading our mail, threatening the security guaranteed to us by the First and Fourth Amendments. And if the terrorists find something they don't like, expect to see a large group of them show up with guns and take you away.

Re:Terrorists

[Zak3056]

The phrase "they hate us for our freedom" is finally true.

It would also be technically difficult.

[frovingslosh]

It would also be technically difficult.

Nothing is too difficult for the person who doesn't have to do it their self.

Let me rewrite that for you Mr. Richard Burr...

[Gription]

"America’s security depends on dispensing with people's liberty when we can come up with a scary possibility."

Liberty is a risk. We are supposed to cherish that we in the "home of the brave" were brave enough to choose the RISK of liberty.
The endless pulpit banging about risks to the "Fatherland" ... (wait... oops... erase, erase, erase...) I mean risks to the Homeland are still a microscopic percentage of the risk of getting in your car to drive to work.

QUIT PROTECTING ME FROM LIBERTY! (and pass me the Advil...)

Re:Let me rewrite that for you Mr. Richard Burr...

[Anonymous Coward]

So....maybe this makes the argument good once again for running your OWN email servers at home, no?

That will just be made illegal, because Hillary did it and terrorists might do it too. Why would you need to run your own mail server instead of paying a nice American business to do it for you, Citizen?

Re:Let me rewrite that for you Mr. Richard Burr...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you want to snoop on the activities of others without justification, potentially to the detriment of everyone, just so you can be seen as "protecting the homeland."

There is no security if the state does not provide it to it's citizens. Intentionally decreasing security for the purpose of security, does not magically cause an increase in security. It causes a decrease.

In this specific case, the decrease comes from actively advertising to your adversaries: "We will monitor all communications to detect your activities." Monitoring only ever works well in secret against an unwilling foe. The second that foe finds out about it, they can take action to avoid it, (use alternative methods, figure out how the monitoring works to bypass it or have it otherwise rendered useless, or outright abandon the monitored practice), or they can engage in counterintelligence. (By using the monitoring to feed an unsuspecting monitor false information.) As if anyone still needed to be told: "Don't use their stuff, it comes with bugs and strings attached." you could not ask for a better declaration of intent than a public hearing on a bill to make the state immune from the consequences of such acts, and to expand it's ability to engage in such acts. Any true foe, immediately upon hearing such a declaration, will be suspect of anything the state does at that point going forward, and will attempt to neutralize anything the state does in an attempt to harm them. Thanks for giving them a heads up.

As for the actual citizens, we experience a decrease in security too. Our foes now will redouble their efforts to avoid law-enforcement. (Bad.) Our allies will now suspect us of snooping on them and want to distance themselves from us. (Worse.) We, the citizens, will now suffer due to the decreased demand for our products and services due to lack of trust, in a time when our economy is not faring too well, and people are still trying to rebuild their lives after their losses. (Fail.) We will also suffer more due to our personal info being potentially accessible from others either due to abuse or bad implementations, which can lead to (personal / medical) identity theft, (bank / credit) fraud, death, false suspicion, etc. (EPIC FAIL.) Thanks for making us, the people your supposed to protect, less safe.

By the way, "Homeland"? Take your patriotism and shove it. It's shameful to take pride in the violation of the privacy and freedom of others when the country itself was founded on those principles.

Which government?

[AndyCanfield]

Report to which government? My email is at Yandex in Moscow. I moved it there from gmail just before Ed Snowden's revelations. I don't want ANYBODY knowing EVERYTHING about me.

It's too late

[AndyKron]

The noose is tightening. Pretty soon we won't even know that it's too late.

Re:Good thing ...

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

... my email provider is based in Sweden

Great, so not only can the US government easily spy on it, so can the Swedish government.

Sorry, but running away isn't going to solve this problem.

why not go full Stasi?

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Senate Intelligence Committee has unanimously approved draft legislation that would requires email providers and social media sites to report any suspected terrorist activities to the government.

Why stop there? If you're going to have various private parties report on each other, why not go full Stasi? Have teachers report on students, kids on parents, parents on kids, etc. And we clearly need a Division of Garbage Analysis and a Main Administration for Struggle Against Suspicious Persons.

Come on Dianne Feinstein, what are you waiting for? We all know it's what you really want anyway.

The Magic Words

[dcollins]

"This year’s legislation arms the intelligence community with the resources they need"

Translation: There's nothing here that really needs to be illegal; and we do not expect this to be enforced regularly or equitably. We just want to be able to declare as criminal anyone we take a disliking to, or who doesn't bend over for us on demand.

SYCOS Act

[J'raxis]

These idiots always like coming up with pithy and (in their opinion) appropriate names for their laws, so here's a suggestion for this one: The Send Your Customers Over Seas Act, or SYCOS Act for short. Why? Because this will drive anyone interested in privacy to overseas email providers like Startmail, a company who intentionally set themselves up outside U.S. jurisdiction for reasons exactly like this.

My government

[p51d007]

Has changed me from a Conservative (not to be confused with Republican) to more and more each day to a Constitutional Libertarian. I've gotten to the point in my life (mid 50's) that I see myself more as a libertarian, than anything else. I do not trust government. I believe governments sole purpose, as written in the constitution, is to provide for the defense of our nation, promote general welfare. THAT'S IT! The rest, should be left to each state. Government now, wants to be our mommy & daddy for flipping everything, taking more and more responsibility for our lives, along with more and more of our money. It's about to the point where I should just have my paycheck direct deposited at the Treasury department, and hope they send ME back enough money to survive, along with a thank you card to them for being so nice.

Re:Great

[nehumanuscrede]

Oh and while I'm thinking about it. . . . .

"America’s security depends on our intelligence community’s ability to detect and thwart attacks on the homeland"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

With nearly zero oversight and the bending or outright breaking of many constitutionally protected rights, you all have done an outstanding job thus far at preventing such actions on US soil.

*** Just how many failures does it take before Congress realizes the common denominator for failure here IS the intelligence community ? ***

Off the top of my head in no particular order and limiting the list to 2001 and beyond:

World Trade Center - 9/11
Anthrax Laced Letters
LA Airport shootings
DC Sniper Attacks
Ohio Sniper Attacks
Fort Hood Shooting
Boston Marathon Bombing
Ricin Laced Letters
Church Shootings
School Shootings
Most Mass Shootings for that matter

I find the lack of competence in our leadership . . . . . disturbing. :|

Solution: Cry Wolf

[LostMonk]

My Solution: Cry Wolf