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US House Passes Bill Requiring Warrants To Search Old Emails (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Monday to require law enforcement authorities to obtain a search warrant before seeking old emails from technology companies, a win for privacy advocates fearful the Trump administration may work to expand government surveillance powers. The House passed the measure by a voice vote. But the legislation was expected to encounter resistance in the Senate, where it failed to advance last year amid opposition by a handful of Republican lawmakers after the House passed it unanimously. Currently, agencies such as the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission only need a subpoena to seek such data from a service provider.
Didn't realize the constitution applied only to recent correspondence...
This would NOT be an issue in this same way if we were allowed to retrain physical possession of our email. That would put the 9 points on OUR side.
Let me illustrate by example of how Gmail could work. There could be an option to store the email on our own computers. Generous as the google is with their storage allocation, I have way more than that in my OWN physical possession and I could, if allowed, possess my own email there.
This could even be done in a way that is compatible with Gmail's business model. If I elect to use the option of local storage, then I would agree to run a special kind of search program on my computer. That search program would then issue search queries to the google's ad servers and, without ever examining my email on their servers, the appropriate advertisements could be served to my computer. (In my case, that means to be ignored, since I have a personal policy against feeding the google now that they've clearly gone to the dark side. Latest evidence I've read was in How Google Works .)
If the google actually valued my privacy, they could throw in an option to encrypt the email end-to-end, even while it is on their servers. That could include while it is on their services for backup purposes, too, which would mean that they would never have any "possession" of the clear text version of my personal email, and I would retain the possession of the decryption key. If the House of so-called Representatives then wanted to read my email, they might need to consider the actual Bill of Rights. You know, the stuff about warrants and probable cause and all that jazz.
Oh well. Nobody expects the Email Inquisition. Y'all have a nice day, hear?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Your post didn't indicate one way or the other if you know this already, but until everybody moved to Gmail, most email was stored locally (except for @yahoo and a few minor ones). Your mail program would use a protocol called POP3 to download the new email from the server, then the server would delete it. You can still do it that way.
The disadvantage of local storage is that it's either stored on your laptop or your phone or whatever, so it's not accessible anywhere and everywhere with just POP3. If you want it accessible from multiple devices, you set up your own IMAP server (or get own from a trusted provider).
Republicans realize they have more to fear from Trump reading their emails than Obama...
No, they just had Obama promising to veto any such thing. Republicans tabled all sorts of legislation because of that obstructionism. Which is fine. It's supposed to be an adversarial relationship, between those two co-equal branches of government.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So in your line of thinking all search warrants and subpoenas are "rubber stamped"? And in your little paranoid and delusional world who would get to determine what warrants and subpoenas are not rubber stamped? I will assume you also think all FISA warrants or NSL's are not necessary or needed when you, like most people, do not understand that any evidence collected under a FISA warrant or NSL is not admissible in court. While FISA warrants and NSL's provide powers that can override constitutional protections these investigative tools allow the government to investigate national security threats but limit their usefulness in court. It's a balanced nuance of preserving people's rights while also allowing national security threats to be handled. The Constitution is not a suicide pact and there are legitimate threats to national security that cannot be ignored. People have been claiming their Constitutional rights have been taken away from them but cannot point to a single example where this imaginary loss of rights has actually harmed anyone. Or that someone has been charged with a crime and been denied the chance to even argue their rights have been violated. On the other hand there is a shit load of examples of charges being summarily dismissed because the court ruled that their rights were violated. The government tried using the Patriot Act provisions to prosecute two different cases and both cases were thrown out of court because the Patriot Act provisions were ruled unconstitutional. The government has never tried using the Patriot Act in court since then.
The most annoying thing about people like you is how fast you would reverse your opinions on warrants and subpoenas the minute you become the victim of a crime. All the people complaining about the government spy agencies actually spying were the same people railing on the government for allowing 9/11 to happen.
> > This would NOT be an issue in this same way if we were allowed to retrain physical possession of our email.
> You know you ARE "allowed to retain lhysical possession of your email" - that's POP3
>> Yes I know quite well.
Okay so when you wrote "if we were allowed to retrain physical possession of our email" and all that crap, you DID know it was bullshit. You just felt like pretending that you have to store your email with Google, even though you know better, for your silly rant.
Now that it's been pointed out that your claims are factually false, you want to pretend your "deep". Maybe if you're a *really* deep thinker, your alternative facts will become real, right? LSD might help too.
Don't you love all of the GOP bashing even though the GODDAMN BILL WAS WRITTEN BY A REPUBLICAN?
You want to give Trump an extra 4 years? Keep bashing and invalidating people who are trying to do good things.
This article is shit. Where's the actual votes? How can you bash the GOP as if you know they ALL opposed it? Do we know what Democrats tried to oppose it and sell out their country? No? Nah, let's ignore them because it messes with "Muh Narrative."
Here's a link with more detail than the OP's article and the plumb sum of every comment here too:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/...
It doesn't have the votes talled yet. (And the article didn't even mention the fucking bill HR number?) But it's got the list of cosponsers which is a pretty obvious indicator of SUPPORTERS of the bill.
64 Republicans
44 Democrats.
What's that? What? MORE REPUBLICANS cosponsered the bill? No! Surely, the GOP's only goal is to "Take Muh Freedoms!", remember?
Goddamn. Everyone posting here who whines about "The System" doesn't realize their freaking ignorance and blind "Support the Team!" politics are the reason this country is so damn gridlocked in the first place.
And I say all of this as a both-side voting, MODERATE. But nah, feel free to disregard my actual facts under the "He's probably a just Nazi" routine and continue ignoring the GOP people helping you (and ignoring the crimes of the Democrats who DON'T help you). That'll sure make the USA a better place.
The guy thinks every mundane thought he has is so "deep", and when you and I, and others, point out he's factually incorrect, that's only because we're not on his level of deep meditation.
10 to 1 says he'll come down in a couple hours, after the acid/shrooms/laced weed wears off.
yet again. Sad!
Fixed that for you.
Your inline approach is obviously confrontational. Might be sincere, too, but I doubt it, so I just scanned your reply before deciding to ignore it.
I've concluded that my proposed solution to one part of the problem has obscured the deeper issue of "possession". Even though Gmail may be the specific email service where privacy is most abused and even though (I believe) there is no good reason for that abuse, the discussion should be redirected back to the original topic of "Possession is STILL 9 points of the law".
I guess I should thank you [592200] for changing the subject when you diverted the discussion, but perhaps I should have simply said that I am not interested in that new subject. Upon reflection, I guess your real point is that you are a Luddite of some sort? You agree with me about the importance of possession and miss the old days when we had more direct control over our email? Or something.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
That'sv true.
A *hint* as to whether your email is actually deleted or not is if the provider delivers 100 spams a day to you (possibly marked with a header for you to use), or if they filter spam out pretty well.
An old-school provider who lets you see *all* of your spam, and maybe marks it with a Spamassassin score, is *less likely* to be retaining it. It takes ten times as much resources to retain if spam isn't filtered out first.
I have been robbed multiple times. I fail to see how any of these gee-whiz powers would have helped to catch the thieves.
Your comment is very presumptuous about both my point and my views. I don't care about NSL's or FISA warrants. I don't care about going after terrorists or enemy combatants. I care about Americans in America who the government is abusing. I care about real people, whom I have personally spoken with, who have and are facing these issues, not people in some thought experiment. Some of them are non-Abrahamic religious minorities that the government seems obsessed with, mostly due to a lack of understanding of their religion. People and causes you have never heard about...
I care about warrants issued by in district courts that function as rubber stamps. I read search warrants every day and more then you may suspect are very weak. They have a very diluted view on what probable cause is. These warrants are generally sealed and in many cases the subject of them is never notified that they were the subject of a search. I am not just talking about electronic records; mail, cars, homes are all searched in this way. I think you would be shocked at the number of packages that both state and federal search warrants are obtained for and are not found to contain anything illegal. In these cases the package is repacked and delivered to the recipient without notification. These searches as documented in my local courts are no more accurate than a coin toss. But if you are on the wrong side of the coin toss, good luck, your life just got incredibly difficult.
If someone wants to make you a target than all an agent of the government needs is to claim to have been identified by an informant, that claim alone passes as probable cause in this world. The "informant" is never made available to the judge for questioning, they just take the agents word for it. The records of this search could stay sealed for years but don't expect a notification when its unsealed if you are an unknowing subject of one. As for subpoenas, they are rubber stamped, they are not subject to judicial review. The government just issues them to themselves. The court only gets involved if you say no.
As for something that impacts me, if a warrant is actually supported by probable cause, and the judge makes an inquiry into the facts of the matter, then I am cool with it being issued. What more often happens is the judge reads the application and signs it. When you fail to be skeptical, then you become a rubber stamp. I believe that it should be very hard for the government to invade your privacy or convict you of a crime. Our society has given the government far too much latitude in these matters and it needs to be rolled back.
My simple recommendation? (As has also been mentioned elsewhere), use GPG, PHP, or some other form of encryption.. While not a perfect solution, it should prove adequate to the majority of end-user privacy needs. Waiting for the government or a free internet email provider to protect your privacy is not unlike waiting for a burglar to return your stolen property.
Damned Android auto-correct.
The option of keeping a lot of email on a server for a long time due to the acoustically coupled modem limitations needed legal protection.
....???
In 2017 your ISP email account is as legal protected as your home computer with all its files....
Email kept only at home on a computer, email that stayed on an ISP or server for years or just been networked along day or hours later. Email later found on some server when the server was under investigation with valid court paperwork for the server, accounts.
The other aspect is email on the move along the pipes and tubes of a providers network. Can a police charity public/private partnership scan every email and attachment to see if every file, link was under investigation by law enforcement or might be of interest to law enforcement in real time?
If that file was on a server for days or years or just moving from an account to another internet user?
Now all emails are been scanned at the server level anyway by different agencies globally for a lot of different reasons.
Police charity public/private partnerships will still have the server side real time scans of all files.
An easy FISA warrant or NSL will still get in, then allowing for legal, local domestic legal work.
The FISA warrant or NSL won't be used in a domestic court setting but if every US provider is in some way connected to other nations why not collect it all...
With new raw data sharing rules, domestic agencies will get all that raw bulk data, no more minimisation for domestic US users.
So new domestic privacy laws are great but as many other domestic agencies are now getting raw real time data
NSA to share data with other agencies without “minimizing” American information (1/13/2017)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The house is majority Republican. It is the Republicans that just passed this privacy measure
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Yeah, somehow busts the myth that Republicans are against privacy and for an intrusive law enforcement all in the name of security
Once upon a time slashdot would have rejoiced at news like this. The notion that privacy is serious and given precedence- celebrated. Now we have page after page of politics, and drivel about this not being good enough. This is a win. Requiring warrants is as good as it gets. Be happy.
Even a rubber stamp is useful for documenting a trail of who did what and their claimed reasons. Far better than not documenting it, and will make people think twice about having a look just for fun/blackmail.
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Z^1
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Z^2
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Z^3
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Z^4
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Z^5
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Yeah, somehow busts the myth that Republicans are against privacy and for an intrusive law enforcement all in the name of security
Myth? You do realise the whole NSA/Snowden spying and torture thing occurred under Republican watch yeah?
I'm not saying Dems are any better, but let's not get too carried away here...
Yeah, somehow busts the myth that Republicans are against privacy and for an intrusive law enforcement all in the name of security
What myth? That's not even a debate. They ARE against privacy and support intrusive law enforcement. Many democrats are as well. That has a lot more to do with people in power wanting to retain that power than it does with any given political persuasion. Republicans have zero concern for your privacy if money can be made from it or political power (including policing) can be derived from stepping on it. Democrats have somewhat different motivations and tactics but the effect on your privacy tends to be similar in the end.
The only thing really protecting your privacy and keeping police away is that the two parties cannot agree on the details. When they do agree on the details we get idiotic outcomes like the TSA or the Department of Homeland Security.
Let me illustrate by example of how Gmail could work. There could be an option to store the email on our own computers. Generous as the google is with their storage allocation, I have way more than that in my OWN physical possession and I could, if allowed, possess my own email there.
There IS an option to store your email on your own computer. There always has been. That option didn't go away just because Gmail came along. Gmail is a choice, not a requirement.
If the google actually valued my privacy, they could throw in an option to encrypt the email end-to-end, even while it is on their servers.
Expecting an advertising company to value your privacy is an idiotic thing to do. Nobody is going to value your privacy more than you do. If it matters to you then take measures to secure it. The tools exist and have for a long time. If you use Gmail that is a tacit admission that you don't care so much about the privacy of whatever is sent through that email account.
Uhhhh, the entire purpose of email is to send it to other people. Perhaps hundreds of other people. How do you retrain [sic] possession of something you must distribute to others for it to be of any value?
True but perhaps the wrong question. The important question to my mind is how do you secure the message (legally and/or technologically) against intrusive snooping by the government and perhaps others? Both in transit and in storage. Not an easy question to answer and I think the legal piece of it is very important and somewhat behind the technology.
Myth? You do realise the whole NSA/Snowden spying and torture thing occurred under Republican watch yeah?
Which administration was in charge in 2013? Republican watch?
Just another day in Paradise
Ssshhh..keep it down, this doesn't fit the black & white mainstream narrative at all. Are you trying to sow chaos? Don't stress out those who aren't near a safe space.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Doesn't mean a thing until / unless passed by the senate and signed by the president. If the president won't sign, then there is yet another process to go through.
So while yes, this isn't a bad thing as it stands, it is not yet a good thing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
what's the problem with you?
you keep posting this 'z' bullshit.
what the fuck??
(are you a child or brain damaged? or both?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Indeed, because Mr. Obama was really Stazi.
It is nice to know who took the cookies from the cookie jar as long as there are consequences. If there are not, it means nothing.
In fact it means more than nothing, because is uses resources that are not needed.
It is as if the NSAA or CIA are asked "Do you do illegal things" and they go "Yeah, we do. LOL" and then nothing happens.
It is nice for administration and stats, just like the numbering of Jews during WWII (Yep, going full Godwin here). It is absolutely meaningless and even will give people some idea that what they do is morally correct and justified. (Not using the word legal here.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
At first I thought GP was joking and you deserved a "Whooosh!" but now I'm not so sure. Poe's Law and all that.
What's even more WTF is that someone keeps modding him up for it.
It was a voice vote - unanimous / bipartisan in the house. I'm curious why it's only senate republicans opposing this, and not house republicans, but it does seem to be a partisan issue. Just not in the house, for some reason.
Maybe you misread the summary? A similar measure passed the house unanimously last year, but was blocked in the senate "amid opposition by a handful of Republican lawmakers." They could easily have overridden a veto. But they never let it get that far, and it was Republicans who blocked it.
I won't draw any partisan conclusions from that. It clearly had strong support in both parties, and most Republicans supported it. But trying to blame Obama doesn't fit the facts.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Myth? You do realise the whole NSA/Snowden spying and torture thing occurred under Republican watch yeah?
Which administration was in charge in 2013? Republican watch?
You know 2013 was only when the information was leaked, not when it happened yeah?
Most of the bad stuff we have now started with Bush jnr, 'war on terror' etc. Sure Obama kept it going, but it started with GWB, which is why the R's earned the reputation they have now.
Z^6
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Z^7
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.