The second proposal is that all email providers would be required to provide a back door to allow the government to tap email traffic. As an email provider I find this particularly disturbing.
My opinion is that both are extremely dangerous proposals. The first allows shutdown for merely being accused of something even if it isn’t so. I personally host many web sites that have been accused of things that aren’t so.
The second is not only shocking on its face, but if there is a government back door I guarantee it will leak and every hacker is going to get hold of it.
Personally I would not comply with either law should it pass and would go to jail before I gave the US government a back door into my systems.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for those who don’t know, is the leading online civil liberties organization on the planet. If not for them the online world would be a far different place than what it is now.
Here is the link to the story.
“Government wants back door into your email”
Well that title says it all!
If this becomes law, government is going to f**k us in the a$$ yet again.
Hasn’t the government been backdooring us for years now?
No – at least not on my servers. Email is decentralized and the government doesn’t have access unless they are given access.
Both of these show how out of touch politicians are from reality. There are these things called borders…
Perkel, you made your bed as Obama cheerleader, now sleep in it.
#6
Perhaps I’m not quite aware of how YOUR government works, but I was under the impression that the president signed bills into law AFTER congress approved them.
they already do own it my friends……google is in bed with government…The FBI program Carnivore has been around for some time…
A better alternative would be if everybody held open email boxes. Forget about privacy, it never existed. Tweet your messages, sent and received. I work in a place where my emails are subject to unrestricted interception and in some cases unauthorised forwarding to government and corporate bodies. Privacy is an illusion, it never existed.
I host my own regular e-mail. Who are they going to ask to tap my e-mail? They would have to ask me. I then stop using that e-mail server.
This is only an extension of police powers into new tech. The cops should be able to tap into a person’s email WITH A WARRANT just as they can currently tap phones or search premises. Uncontrolled tapping is another issue entirely.
How are they going to put the PGP genie back in the bottle? They want to lock the barn door after all the horses have gone. What a bunch of incompetent nincompoops.
Asking permission for what they are already doing…
Marc,
I totally agree with your concerns. My suggestion is for everyone to encrypt all communications as much as possible. Vendors need to start implement OpenPGP and GPG everywhere, and turn on encryption by default. Therefore, even if the government taps your server they can’t read my encrypted messages. Let’s at least make it difficult for snoops, be they government or otherwise.
iTS a BIG game.
Corps want MAJOR protection..
Gov wants Controls..
ACTA/DMCA/.. is going to HURT.
Angel or whatever carnivore turned into keeps up with every search and such.They can and are getting most of what they want from your ISP.
The right to read all you email rather that just the headings is new, however progressives such as Nancy P. don’t believe in the Constitution. Watched and listened as those words came out of her mouth myself. It may have been on play back but there was no doubt she said it and she didn’t stammer when she said it.
Several in the Obama administration have said they don’t believe in free speech especially if those speaking are dissenters. They haven’t acted against the media outlets yet but the view was expressed.
This is one place where Obama and his progressive supporters seem to be in lock step with George Bush Jr. No privacy and no free speech. That and you are guilty until you can convince the people that decided to convict you without due process that you are innocent.
I fear the Department of Homeland Security much more than I fear the Taliban. DHS has stunning resources. The temptation of corruption is inevitably irresistible.
Marc, this goes way beyond email: “The second (proposal) is an Obama Administration proposal that would end online privacy as we know it by requiring all Internet communication service providers — from Facebook to Skype to your webmail provider — to rebuild their systems to give the government backdoor access to all of your private Internet communications.”
My impression is that even Steve Gibson’s CryptoLink would be required to have a backdoor for a valid warrant, thus defeating one of the main goals of CryptoLink (Trust No One). The only way to offer a service, as I understand it, is to have no presence on US soil.
Wow I guess our government wants all tech to move offshore. How else can you maintain some semblance of privacy. Look out Belize here I come!
#19,
wow…dont blame the idiots we elected/VOTED into office. PASS the buck to 1 person, you cant handle MORE THEN 1 idiot at a time?
Can I suggest to all of you, the ramifications of this and Previous TESTING(?) of gathering info across the net.
Scanning the net.
Scanning sites.
Scanning every picture, post, Email, REMOTE email sources (gmail, yahoo, MSN, Excite, AOL and BILLIONS OF OTHERS…
In 1 day, you could/would fill a 20×20 room with PAPER 4-6 foot high..REQUIRE 10 people to Sift threw it for the NEXT YEAR..
Even computer sorting for KEY WORDS…Scrambled words, Foreign words, References, Direct comments… WILL need a Main frame, Beowulf?? setup of systems..and STILL TAKE a year for 1 days worth of DATA..
The terabyte amounts of DATA to be sampled and sorted and PRINTED and sent out to be analyzed.. STILL takes TIME
Why is this piece ignoring the fact Microsoft told us in 1995 they put backdoors into Windows to let the NSA snoop into our files whenever they want to. It is included in every version of Windows sold and they don’t need a new backdoor they already have one. It has always been assumed the same is true for Apple but I am not aware of Apple publishing anything about it, whereas Microsoft came clean on this 15 years ago.
Seems to me somebody just wants to make sure any outfit can use it (the backdoor) with impunity and not just the NSA and CIA. The real government never asks permission to snoop they just do it.
What the hell is wrong with the world. Over twenty comments and not one peep about Spy vs Spy. Those two take me back, good times, good times. They are so wonderfully indicative of the current American society.
#24,
there were 3 spys..
White, Black and gray..
The gray spy was Female.
BESIDES MAD mag, they had their own book series. $0.55 per paper back.
Want more? I might still have a few .75 versions.
#21,
Didi the telephone industry leave America when it became knowledge that the government taps people’s phones whenever they can convince a judge they need to? As I pointed out earlier, this is the police ensuring they can access the new communications channels as they always have accessed the old.
The geeks need to save us!
Every email we send needs to be encrypted.
It’s crazy that our email can be read by anybody — especially since the technology has been available for years.
So, c’mon Geeks! Only you can save us!
The government isn’t going to do it. Microsoft and Apple are not going to do it.
BTW, I’ve been lobbying for security in our Internet tools for years. I’ve written emails, made suggestions for the next release, etc.
But, with the excepction of Phil Zimmerman, I have not found anybody who even seems to understand the issue.
I think the fans of the Internet are still working on the false assumption that the Internet can’t be censored.
But, Dubai, China and Russian identity thieves have proven that Internet can be screened.
Here’s what we need:
all is encrypted
all web browsing is anonymous, encrypted and by proxy
Importantly, this needs to be built-in and be default so that everybody does it. As is stands now, if you send an encrypted email or use a proxy in China or Dubai, it sets off the packet sniffers who ID you as a subversive.
>> Alfred Persson said, on September 28th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
>> There is a fifth column destroying America’s Freedoms, its President Obama and the Democratic majority.
When the Bush Administration was reading our emails and tapping our phones, you called us terrorist sympathizers if we complained.
So you’ll understand why I think your crocodile tears about freedom are full of crap now.
#28
gREG,
And how Anon, was the NET BEFORE MS took it over?
You could sign in to site Fully anon, BEFORE IE entered the market.
NOW there are sites that GRAB your info as soon as you click them, using IE and the protocols MS created..
ECA,
I don’t totally understand your point but I consider Microsoft the problem, not the solution.
The reason big corporations don’t like security tools is because they make money selling your private information. If they can’t track you across the Net, it hurts their business model.
But, this lack of security leaves us consumers open to identity theft and other fraud.
Bush’s spying on my emails and Dubai’s tracking my web surfing has made me a strong privacy advocate. It isn’t just “Big Brother” either — a bigger threat might be all the “little brothers” at your place of work or your ISP provider who have their own agendas.
The only people who can save us from these threats to our privacy are the geeks who write the software — both our applications but also the software that runs the Internet.
But, I can’t find any of these guys who seem to care about Internet security– or even understand the problem.
gREG,
How old is the NEt?
How old is Win 95 and IE?
Before IE, we could wonder the net. And you Either SIGNED IN, or went Anon. Most sites didnt ask for a name. And it was a PAIN getting around. Sites also didnt track you, MUCH.
It wasnt GRAPHICAL nor intuitive. You needed to know where you were going, and HOW to get there.
In many cases, you had to Jump from each node to the next…You couldnt get from West to East, unless you knew the path..
So far I haven’t seen any coverage of this on the mainstream Tv network news. Have then snuck in thru on any cable Tv networks like CNN. Bet Fox News ain’t covering it.
It’s not some much what the government wants to do. As it’s what the US Military wants to do, via the government. Because went you think about it, we all use their old DARPA network, that they turned over to public use, when discreet providers like Prodigy were proving to difficult to monitor the mail thru. So DARPA became the Internet, with the gov. monitoring 24/7, before there was any strong data encryption possible. Only now is there any griping from “the gov.” that they increasingly can’t read everyone’s email. Though probably less than 1% of users bother to encrypt message text. More likely it’s in response to VPNs. So the “gov.” can’t spy on industrial and commercial emails. And get some of that juicy insider trading info. How else can the big fish steal the ideas of the new little fish, if the gov. isn’t able to eavesdrop in the interests of protecting the big fish’s bottom line?
I believe I read some years ago, how some French concerns suspected that IBM was conducting industrial espionage, via the US’s worldwide surveillance network. The NSA was apparently tipping IBM off, about it competitors. Why? Well don’t you think some US government leaders might own IBM stock?