Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

Obama DOJ, Yahoo Battle Over E-Mail Privacy

The Department of Justice under the Obama administration is now saying that the government has the right to seize and scrutinize Americans’ recent e-mails, without a search warrant, without any showing of probable cause, and without notice to the e-mail account holders.

Yahoo, and a coalition of other companies and organizations, are standing up against this blatant violation of privacy rights.

Wired:

Yahoo and federal prosecutors in Colorado are embroiled in a privacy battle that’s testing whether the Constitution’s warrant requirements apply to Americans’ e-mail.

The  legal dust-up, unsealed late Tuesday, concerns a 1986 law that already allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an ISP or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The government now contends it can get e-mail under 180-days old if that e-mail has been read by the owner, and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.

Yahoo is challenging the government’s position and defying a court order to turn over some customer e-mail to the feds. Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and other groups late Tuesday told the federal judge presiding over the case that accessing e-mail under 180 days old requires a valid warrant under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether it has been read.

“The government says the Fourth Amendment does not protect these e-mails,” Kevin Bankston, an EFF lawyer, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “What we’re talking about is archives of our personal correspondence that they would need a warrant to get from your computer but not from the server.”

If the courts adopt the government’s position, the vast majority of Americans’ e-mail would be accessible to the government without probable cause, whenever law enforcement believes the messages would be relevant to a criminal investigation, even if the e-mail’s owner is not suspected of wrongdoing.

Greenwald:

Federal law is crystal clear that a search warrant is required for the Government to obtain any emails that have been stored less than 180 days — one that requires a showing of probable cause and that the documents sought to be described with particularlity.  In contrast to the nation’s largest telecoms’ eager cooperation with Bush’s illegal surveillance programs, Yahoo — to its credit — refused to turn over any such emails to the Government without a search warrant.  As a result, the DOJ is now seeking a federal court Order compelling the company to comply with its demands, and a coalition of privacy groups and technology companies — led by EFF and including Google — have now filed a brief supporting Yahoo’s position.  Both Yahoo and that coalition insist that federal law as well as the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure protection bar the Obama DOJ from acquiring these emails without a search warrant.

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To allow the Government to access without search warrants the contents of one’s private email communications — as opposed to, say, merely information about from whom one received or to whom one sent email — is as central a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee as can be imagined.  Of course, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 — which passed with Obama’s support and was designed to legalize much of the Bush NSA surveillance program — already legalized warrantless surveillance of most emails sent internationally without any real court oversight, but the Obama DOJ’s position here would result in a far lower burden being applied to purely domestic emails.  The Fourth Amendment threats are obvious.

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If nothing else, consider the implications of allowing the U.S. Government to obtain and read emails simply by a vague showing of “relevance” to a criminal investigation, all without (a) any demonstration of probable cause, (b) a warrant from a court, (c) any notice provided to you that they’re doing so, and (d) any Fourth Amendment protections.  As the brief filed by EFF, Google and others puts it, granting the Government such authority would have “extremely significant implications for the privacy of Americans’ communications.”  Yet that is exactly the power the Obama DOJ is claiming it possesses.

Tags: DOJ, e-mail, Internet, Obama, privacy, surveillance state, Yahoo
Category privacy, U.S. politics |

Business Group Coalition Urges Stronger Online Privacy Laws

I am a bit suspicious, in times of the public-private Surveillance State, seeing that AT&T, Google and Microsoft are in this coalition. Also, I wonder what use these legislative improvements have in a time in which, by means of the PATRIOT Act and FISA, any sort of private data can already be acquired by the state with the help of private companies.

But still. NYT:

A broad coalition of technology companies, including AT&T, Google and Microsoft, and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum said Tuesday that it would push Congress to strengthen online privacy laws to protect private digital information from government access.

The group, calling itself the Digital Due Process coalition, said it wanted to ensure that as millions of people moved private documents from their filing cabinets and personal computers to the Web, those documents remained protected from easy access by law enforcement and other government authorities.

The coalition, which includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, wants law enforcement agencies to use a search warrant approved by a judge or a magistrate rather than rely on a simple subpoena from a prosecutor to obtain a citizen’s online data.

The group also said that it wanted to safeguard location-based information collected by cellphone companies and applications providers.

Members of the group said that they would lobby Congress for an update to the current law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was written in 1986, nearly a decade before Internet use became mainstream. They acknowledged that some proposals were likely to face resistance from law enforcement agencies and the Obama administration.

Under a proposed set of principles, law enforcement agencies or other government representatives would have to obtain a search warrant based on a showing of probable cause before they could obtain a person’s e-mail, photos or other electronic documents stored in a service like Gmail, Flickr or Facebook. Under current law, much of that information is accessible through a simple subpoena, which can be issued under looser rules.

Tags: Digital Due Process coalition, Internet, privacy, surveillance state
Category privacy, U.S. politics |

The Dark Side Of The Web

Large parts of the Internet are not traceable by your average search engine, Google. Beneath the radar lurks the “deep web”, and beyond that, the “dark web”.

Interesting article on PC Pro:

When Google indexes so many billions of web pages that it doesn’t even bother listing the number any more, it’s hard to imagine that much lies beyond its far-reaching tentacles.

Beneath, however, lies an online world that few know exists. It’s a realm of huge, untapped reserves of valuable information containing sprawling databases, hidden websites and murky forums. It’s a world where academics and researchers might find the data required to solve some of mankind’s biggest problems, but also where criminal syndicates operate, and terrorist handbooks and child pornography are freely distributed.

At the same time, the underground web is the best hope for those who want to escape the bonds of totalitarian state censorship, and share their ideas or experiences with the outside world.

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The first thing to grasp is that, while the elements that make up this other web have aspects in common, we’re not talking about a single, unified entity. Those in the know will often talk in terms of the deep or invisible web, darknets and the dark web, and you might think these are all the same thing. In fact, they’re separate phenomena, albeit linked by common themes, properties or interests.

The deep web isn’t half as strange or sinister as it sounds. In computer-science speak, it refers to those portions of the web that, for whatever reason, have been invisible to conventional search engines such as Google.

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There’s nothing necessarily secretive about the majority of this hidden content. When asked if the deep web harbours criminal or illicit activities, Dr Freire explains that “underworld” content is just as likely to be found on the “surface web”, and describes the deep web as “a more benign place” than some imagine. There are, however, areas that are more intentionally secretive, and this is where the deep becomes the dark.

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Often associated with small file-sharing networks, the term darknet refers to any closed, private network that operates on top of the more conventional internet protocols. To join these hidden internets, all you need to do is install a program, such as Freenet or I2P, and browse away, secure in the knowledge that you’re almost impossible to trace.

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On Freenet, nobody knows who you are, or what you’re looking at. Each system also contributes hard disk space, which is occupied by a data cache containing chunks of heavily encrypted data that the program can reassemble into Freenet forums and sites.

A trip through Freenet can be unsettling. It isn’t hard to find sites offering hard-core porn or such charming tomes as The Terrorist’s Handbook, Arson Around with Auntie ALF and the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, along with copyrighted software, video and music to download.

And while we didn’t come across any child pornography during our time on Freenet (for obvious reasons, we didn’t look), it’s widely acknowledged that it can be found.

Read more here.

Tags: dark web, deep web, Google, Internet
Category gadgets / futuristic |