Scientific American's editors write: "Google reports that US government agencies send it nearly 1,000 requests for user information every month; the company complied with 93 percent of them between January and June of last year. Verizon executives told Congress in 2007 that law-enforcement agencies send the company 90,000 requests for user details a year, including information on the specific locations of cell-phone customers."
Digital Due Process has formed to ask Congress to require a warrant if a law-enforcement agency wants to look at private user data. (photo: iStockphoto)
Read My E-mail? Get a Warrant!
11 January 12
ast October the well-known hacking group Chaos Computer Club revealed that the German state police had been monitoring the computers of ordinary citizens using specially designed surveillance software. This spyware could peek into users' files, record keystrokes, take screenshots of Web pages users happened to be visiting, and even commandeer Web cams and microphones, giving the cops an open window into the home. The revelations invited comparisons to the Stasi, the infamous police force that operated in the former East Germany.
It was a clear violation of citizens' rights - and about as quaint as a cold war spy movie. Nowadays governments have far more comprehensive ways of monitoring citizens than merely tapping computers on desktops or in briefcases. Hardly any of us still keep our private data solely in any one machine; instead it resides on corporate servers far from our homes. E-mail providers save messages in giant server farms distributed around the world. Online services such as Google Docs, Dropbox and iCloud store spreadsheets and word-processing files in the "cloud" so that we can work on critical documents wherever we happen to be. Wireless phone companies keep records of the individual towers our cell phones connect to as we move around our communities. We tend to assume that these data are ours to keep private, just as we expect that the data on our machines are private. But here the law fails us.
The last wholesale revision to U.S. electronic privacy law was the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA), which prevented law enforcement from eavesdropping on digital files as they moved through the nascent Internet. (Before then, the Department of Justice had argued that monitoring anything that wasn't a voice call wasn't a wiretap and therefore didn't require a warrant.) Yet much has since changed. In 1986, when digital storage was expensive, an e-mail provider would send a file to the recipient's computer and delete the message from its own servers soon thereafter. Congress therefore let the protections of the act expire after a file had been stored for 180 days. In 1986 cell phones were still mostly called "car phones" because the briefcase-size boxes they required were usually kept in a vehicle. The first satellite that would make up the Global Positioning System was still three years away from launch, as was the World Wide Web. In 1986 Facebook genius Mark Zuckerberg was two.
Law-enforcement agencies have been making active use of all the new data these technologies generate. Google reports that U.S. government agencies send it nearly 1,000 requests for user information every month; the company complied with 93 percent of them between January and June of last year (the most recent period for which statistics are available). Verizon executives told Congress in 2007 that law-enforcement agencies send the company 90,000 requests for user details a year, including information on the specific locations of cell-phone customers.
In part because of this deluge, a broad coalition of technology companies, think tanks and privacy advocates called Digital Due Process has formed to ask Congress to update the ECPA for the modern age. Its demand is simple enough: if a law-enforcement agency wants to look at private user data - whether e-mails, documents or cell-phone location information - it needs a warrant. This reasonable demand for clarity is fully in keeping with the spirit of the original ECPA, as well as the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution's prohibition "against unreasonable searches and seizures." Indeed, the Digital Due Process coalition has brought together some uncommon allies - the American Civil Liberties Union, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Amazon, Americans for Tax Reform and AT&T, to name just a few near the top of the alphabet. It deserves support from all members of Congress, too.
It is important to maintain a balance between the needs of security and the right of each citizen to lead a private life. Cops should be able to investigate a suspect's e-mail, location and other data. But first they should have to ask a judge.
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Not much and not for long.
The NSA, FBI, the suppisedly-operating-outside-U.S.-borders CIA, local law enforcement, and brute squads will oppose such laws or any legislation that restricts surveillance or anything that ties their hands; citizen rights be damned -- the less strings, the better.
So Republicans will oppose, and Democrats? They of course are the fixers; not that they fix anything. They are the fix that's in. If they commit too early, as some will -- for various reasons -- but not enough to be the difference, they'll have a difficult time deciding which one or ones will take the hit for backing off. Not that they really care. That's their strength -- the true strength of a D politician -- the ability to stand up to the progressive left and D voters, and facilitate the R agenda.
And it is not really hard to betray D voters. Where as, the blind Republican apologists, which D's are so critical of, are one issue voters (pro-life), Democratic voters, as it turns out, are zero issue voters. Just put a D by a name and get that D vote. That's Obama's strategy.
It won't work though. Lucky for everyone that the pundit talking-point -- one day after O's election in 2008 -- that O should govern toward the center because it was independents who elected him, is not true. The left elected Obama, but not twice -- not something for 0 for O.
I'll keep on complaining about our owners owning us and making a profit even when they incarcerate us till they put me away. My only hope is that their policy is to tolerate complaints (as a safety valve) because they know there is no way we can escape their control or harm them short of an all out revolt - and they seem to be ready or getting ready to take care of that eventuality as well. (If the storm trooper police can't handle us they'll use the army. My ONLY hope is that the army will refuse)
Quote:
Well blow my drawers down, Gertrude; I never even knew. ~~~ Give me a freakin' break; Has this author not heard of Carnivore ...renamed Falcon when the public started discovering it's existance? ! Ironicly, 1986 was just about the time the MIC / Fourth Reich gained control of the amairkan government, and devoted huge high tech resources to be able to violate every tenant of Truth, American Freedom, Liberty, Justice, Civil Rights and Privacy, etc etc etc that they possibly could. It is no coincidence at all that the ECPA has been ignored by the Reich as just a nuisance ever since.
.....just like the hetero and homo sexual child prostitute slaves (literally) in the MIC / Fourth Reich circles, that even frequented the Bush white house via free-pass; A very few blew the whistle, substantiated by tons of evidence, yet wound up in prison themselves as a no-no example for other kids that surely wish they could blow the whistle as a way out.
They obviously drew up a law to recognize the new world of electronical devices and how we need to create a new class of laws to managae it all. BULL! I said it then and I still say it.
Because the further along the technology develops, the more the original model represents reality. The original model is the pre electronic age starting in the 1880's and arguably back to the introduction of the telegraph.
My communication to someone is private, and protected in the US under the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution does not say unless it is magically sent through wires or even through the ether. Of course, any communication from me on a public forum such as this is available to the public. Additionally, carving out new laws that to address what is clearly private property, whether it is a physical document in my home or in my safe deposit box at the bank or data on my personal computer or even data somewhere on a Server farm in Montana is irrelevant. What has changed is the unspoken definition of where my personal property, constitutionall y protected, resides. My home is everywhere.
If my right to be safe from illegal search and seizure ends when the communication or personal effects becomes a series of off and on switches, then the Terrorists have won.
It seems that all 330 million of us, with a few exceptions who work for the Pentagon, are being scrutinized as a possible threat to the other 500 hundred or so people who'd really rather just have this whole country to themselves.
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