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House Panel Approves Bill To Protect Older Email From Gov't Snooping (usatoday.com)
Erin Kelly, reporting for USA TODAY: A key House panel voted Wednesday to pass an email privacy bill that would stop the government from being able to read Americans' old emails without a warrant. The House Judiciary Committee voted 28-0 to approve the Email Privacy Act, a bipartisan bill that would replace a 1986 law that allows government investigators to peruse emails at will if the communications are at least six months old. The bill would require federal officials to obtain a warrant before they can read or view emails, texts, photos or instant messages -- regardless of when the data was sent. "Today is a great day for not only the Fourth Amendment advocates who have fought long and hard to move the Email Privacy Act, but also for all Americans, who are one step closer to having private and secure digital communications," said Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., the lead sponsor of the bill along with Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.
If I kept a diary no one would expect that entries older than six months were not still personal and private.
How is my private communication any different?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
They always stand against freedom.
Just store your old emails locally, instead of with your mail provider. Unless the provider logs everything, for all time, they can't cough it up, even with a warrant.
This wont last long. The FBI, NSA and probably half a dosen other agencies will start to cry "but terrorism!!11!!!"
I'm just here to regulate Funkyness
...as it would make all of the evidence against her in ServerGate inadmissible.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Hate is not too strong of a word.
Well, unless you're an old white man.
"Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., the lead sponsor of the bill..."
It was even in the summary!
But he is an alcoholic and drives drunk so often he got stopped for suspicion of DUI. On average, those drunks drive drunk over a thousand times for every time they're caught. He was probably drunk and forgot his party's anti freedom platform when he voted yes for the bill.
Hate is not strong enough of a word.
Grammar Girl will never touch your wee-wee.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
And besides, how are you ever going to prove they're not snooping anyway? You will not get anything useful from these politicians you keep reelecting. The opportunity to vote out every single member of the house lies before us. Let's take the chance, and then maybe you might prevent government snooping.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
And I bet it would protect Clinton's emails also. hmmm.
I have not read it yet, but I would guess it has one or more of the following people in it.
Diane Feinstein
Nancy Pelosi
Harry Reid
Lindsey Graham
Mitch McConnell
The Republicans do some good every once in awhile.
Parallel construction is an orthogonal (unrelated) problem. Yes, it can be abused to obtain a warrant dishonestly, but it has legitimate purposes too. It is dangerous, but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it...
You are right — we had less. There was a law that diminished our privacy — in contravention with the Constitution. That law could've been abolished by either Supreme Court hearing a concrete case, or by a new law. The former has not occurred in 30 years, the latter just happened. Rejoice.
No, actually. We're all cows. Moo.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Pine was first released in 1992. Elm, perhaps? Or just the good old mail(1)?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Hillary had her own private e-mail server.
Hillary used that private e-mail server for government communication.
Some of that communication was classified, and wasn't handled as such.
Hillary did not turn over the server at the end of her tenure as Secretary of State (a condition of the rules allowing the use of a non-government server).
When prompted about the server because of Benghazi, Hillary denied access to the server until quite some time later.
When she did, she printed the e-mails out on paper, instead of delivering digital copies.
There is at least one documented case of intentionally having safeguards of classified data circumvented.
Questions circling:
What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a technical standpoint?
What, exactly, was Hillary truly aware of at the time, from a political standpoint?
Exactly what documents were classified, and when (one of the arguments is that some documents were retroactively marked classified)?
You're correct in that the ruling in TFA wouldn't apply to Hillary's case, because Hillary's case involves warrants and subpoenas and other fun documents of that nature, and apply to official government communication. Thus, the ruling in TFA would be superseded by those things anyway.
Well, since the NSA, FBI, CIA etc...don't obey laws anyway, and they and the rest of the government ignore the U.S. Constitution whenever the want to, you just need to be careful what you say in emails or any other electronic or written documents. Not that it matters so much when they can record audio and video from your smartphone any time they want to without your knowledge or consent. And since they almost never have probable cause and don't bother to get a warrant, there isn't much to do about it.
They spy on whatever they want..
Congress is just trying to give the impression that they're actually doing something besides pissing away our tax money.
Parallel construction is an orthogonal (unrelated) problem. Yes, it can be abused to obtain a warrant dishonestly, but it has legitimate purposes too. It is dangerous, but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it...
Parallel construction is far from orthogonal to privacy. It's basically permission to violate your privacy any way they wish, pretend it didn't happen and after the fact come up with an alternate story that doesn't violate your rights. They can just read your emails, listen to your phone calls, open your letters, bug your house, attach a GPS tracker to your car and if they get caught, too bad it's inadmissable. If they don't, a police officer just happened to catch you in the act or they got an anonymous tip or whatever fits their story. You don't get to challenge what really happened, because they'll never tell you.
It's legalized perjury. That whole "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" not applying to the police. And because they don't have to tell it ever, the innocent never get to hear about it either. How can they challenge the constitutionality of something they're not even aware happened? And who is to say they cops didn't add a few more lies to ensure a conviction when they're lying in the first place? It's an insult to both the 4th and 5th amendment, a clever joke like Mr. Smith telling Neo "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?"
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it.
Kinda hard to do when the prosecution ends up charge stacking until 90% of defendants cop a plea.
So to be clear, enhanced interrogation can be abused to obtain information dishonestly, but it has legitimate purposes too.
I want to know how much gray is tolerated with procedure as long as it gets results.
This does nothing to prevent Russian and other foreign hackers from spying on Americans emails. Internet traffic must be encrypted to prevent that.
Citations missing.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It is not, even though police have (ab)used it, because it removes an important safeguard.
I do not like it in the least, but I don't think, it has much relation to the law in TFA.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The problem is that it is impossible to know that this is true. What would it look like, if an innocent person had been convicted because of parallel construction? Would it look like a cop planting a baggie of crack on a suspect because he was clean when "sources" said he was supposed to be a dealer? There's been entire departments fired for that.
Further, once you say "I'm going to break the law to prove that suspect is a criminal" then your proof is immediately suspect. You have already shown yourself to be a lawbreaker, and worse, in the event you have broken the law for no reason, there's a perverse incentive to falsify your proof so you can at least attempt to justify having broken the law. Maybe it would look like a computer that was "discovered" full of kiddie porn after a tip from an "anonymous hacker"? In many cases the same powers used for parallel construction can be used to plant evidence.
It's also interesting that you seem to have set the bar for misuse at "conviction". The government has far more power to fuck with you than simply throwing you in prison (I wrote "jail" here originally, but "jail" is usually where they throw people until their trial or they figure out to make bail, obviously being stuck in jail for a day while you wait for your bail hearing wouldn't fuck up your life at all, no siree, your boss will surely understand!). How does getting dragged out of your house at 6:15AM while people go through every piece of electronic equipment you own sound?
Citations missing.
That's easy enough:
Currently about 97% of federal "convictions" are guilty pleas. Other topics like the "trial penalty" are common enough subjects someone with your low user-number should know, and are easily found in search engines.
The common practice is for prosecutors to heap on an enormous pile of federal crimes until the risk of happening to be found guilty of some obscure aspect of one of them, like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that potentially forbids screen names under penalty of jail time, that the person realizes the relatively short prison stay is better than legal defense that quickly reaches six-figure costs in addition to a high chance of many years in prison, versus a few tens of thousands of costs and a few months to a few years in prison.
For most victims of this type of aggressive prosecution it is only a matter of how much they can afford to fight the prosecutor, not a matter of actual justice for wrongs done.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
http://www.thecrimereport.org/...
Moneyshot- "Ninety-seven percent of federal criminal prosecutions are resolved by plea bargain. In state courts the numbers are comparable."
And quid pro quo
Parallel construction [wikipedia.org] is an orthogonal (unrelated) problem
[citation needed]
but it has legitimate purposes too
[citation needed]
but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it
[citation needed]
I mean fair is fair, right?
What parallel construction does violate is the fundamental bedrock principle of the modern legal system that you are allowed to question your accuser.
It is dangerous, but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it...
And just how do you know this? An 'innocent' person is one who can't be convicted based on the evidence introduced against them. When evidence that wouldn't be admissible is used because of parallel construction, the person 'convicted' is actually innocent.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
2 words. Aaron. Swartz. cite
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Seriously, this is nothing but another attempt to protect Hillary and other political criminals from being indited.
Parallel construction is far from orthogonal to privacy. It's basically permission to violate your privacy any way they wish, pretend it didn't happen and after the fact come up with an alternate story that doesn't violate your rights. They can just read your emails, listen to your phone calls, open your letters, bug your house, attach a GPS tracker to your car and if they get caught, too bad it's inadmissable.
Exactly, thank you for pointing it out, especially considering there is no *time limit* for the monitoring of a citizen via intelligence sharing arrangements with other nation states. I have to admit that I'm still stinging a bit from being called a facist and a hater for pointing that out to people who didn't understand the issue so I hope people do develop a better understanding of what is going on when it come to the reality of their "freedom". Modern western democracies have access to more powers that made East Germany and the USSR police states and people recoil with horror when you suggest the TLAs of the world to follow an appropriate means to control their access to a citizen's meta data products because they assume their freedoms are more than what they actually are.
NEWSFLASH, we already are in a police state and all the freedoms western democracies have struggled to establish have been under attack as the TLAs struggle to find relevance after the Cold War for at least 15 years. I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to do their job but ffs what is the point of a democracy if it is just a name for a police state, while everyone laughs nervously at the reality and calls you a hater for doing so.
Telecommunication warrants *used* to exist and were a requirement for monitoring a citizen's communications. This is a common construct for other western democracies. The sad sad sad thing about this Act is that it is a poor substitute for the constitutional controls that already existed in many western countries that were designed to protect us from the very scenario that we find ourselves in now.
It's not just that we're on a slippery slope, we are already sliding and we don't just need to defend democracy we actually have to work pretty hard to get back *what we had*. Laws like this are good and should be celebrated, but they are not a substitute for the constitution that most nations anti-terrorism acts are violating, that make them a requirement in the first place. We shouldn't need a law that tells government departments that they should behave constitutionally, that they should respect the citizens whose duty it is for them to protect.
All of the Terrorism laws need to be brought into line with the expectations of the citizens of western democracies that the constitution of their country is the ultimate authority they are governed under. Whilst you won't find a shred of sympathy from me from human rights abusing religious fundamentalists, it's plain to see that they are being used as the excuse *every time* to take more freedom from citizens.
As a citizen of a western democracy I expect to not be spied on if I am abiding by the law.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What ever happened to the sudden outbreak of common sense tag? Did it go away? I miss it. It would really apply here dontcha think?
It's not often that I go a day without mud being thrown at me. I kind of like it. I do my best to state the truth and to accept my mistakes and not repeat them. However, I can - and will, tell it like it is. I'm pretty damned on the socialist side (for *very* different reasons than most) and have figured it's a badge of honor to be called an ultraconservative.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
However, I can - and will, tell it like it is.
I'm don't see this as a political issue in the sense of right or left, more of a matter government deceiving the electorate so that it can wield more power over the people, who are being deceived. This is more left *and* right.
These laws were presented with bi-partesan support in my country almost 18 months ago. There was the same public outcry about something that was irrelevant so they could pass something else. The contents of the both articles are identical in intent.
Section 4 in the US version contains meta data retention clauses that would include exactly the information required to directly map the associations of the countries internet users. I wasn't certain these were going to be the same, until I read the discussion draft of the law and then I knew exactly what I was looking at.
Don't fall in the same trap we did.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Apologies for repeating myself, I found a browser window with that comment and thought I hadn't responded. I just realized I've said this to you in another post.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.