Senate Committee Approves Stricter Email Privacy 60
New submitter DJ Jones sent in good news in the attempts to update privacy rights for stored electronic communication. From the article: "The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a bill that would strengthen privacy protection for e-mails by requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant from a judge in most cases before gaining access to messages in individual accounts stored electronically. The bill is not expected to make it through Congress this year and will be the subject of negotiations next year with the Republican-led House."
The EFF seems pretty happy with the proposed changes, but notes that the bill also reduces the protections of the Video Privacy Protection Act in order to allow Netflix et al to sell your viewing history.
National Security letters (Score:3)
So how does this work with the laws allowing those nice national security letter to be issued by the fbi etc?
Re:National Security letters (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't bother to read?
NSL are optional, as optional as strong-arm tactics can be, and typically require a lawsuit to fight back. If providers are prohibited, NSL carries no weight - they simply respond "I can't, that's illegal."
For the reading impaired: It doesn't mean providers *will not* hand over info with just a letter, it means the ones who care will point out that it's not that simple.
Well... (Score:3)
This might be the first time that the CIA and the FBI managed to collaborate on convincing the senate of the importance of privacy...
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Not surprising after the Patreaus scandal. Funny how these things move fast when it afects politicians. They are probably afraid one of them would be the next Patreaus.
Petraeus was appointed with the administration already knowing all about his peccadilloes. They wanted somebody vulnerable there as a cutout and scapegoat to protect and insulate others including the POTUS from the repercussions of their actions, in this case their actions (or lack of actions) surrounding Benghazi and 4 Americans left to die when help was available, all in order to protect the administration and it's agendas regarding Islamic terrorism and the Muslim Brotherhood ("we don't use the 'T-word'
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"Chicago politics" is neo-conservative for "negros with guns".
Chris "Tingles" Matthews, is that you?
How do you get to "racist" from "Chicago-style politics" when the term itself was created to describe the Daly political machine, a corrupt lily-white Chicago Democrat political organization?
pay no attention to the white house guest list
You mean the one with all the regular visits by the Muslim Brotherhood, Trumka, SEIU, and other big-union officials, and the others that they meet with secretly in offices across from the WH to avoid having them on the visitors list?
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Not sure which is worse, the constant conspiracy theories or the use of a tragic attack to further your hatred (of a party, a black president, a political theory, not sure and doesn't matter).
This is not an attack against specifically you. This is my sorrow that people cannot agree that their opponent has valid goals but questionable logic in achieving those goals. They must make their opponents into scheming evildoers with no redeeming values.
Trying to turn Petreus into Vince Foster II does not serve demo
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This is my sorrow that people cannot agree that their opponent has valid goals...
What if one disagrees with the goals and honestly, with reason, does not consider them valid or has reason to believe the publicly-stated goals are not the actual goals because of actions taken that consistently do not match the publicly-stated goals?
Hate Obama for his policies, not is existence or this imaginary crimes.
I don't hate Obama. I don't even know Obama. Neither do you. All I know are his policies and actions, or lack of actions. And what if he *has* committed real, actual crimes? He should get a pass because of race? Isn't that racist?
I don't even care about being c
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> Petraeus was appointed with the administration already knowing all about his peccadilloes.
Since these "peccadiloes" did not start until after the appointment you are really looking like an idiot here.
Re:I am okay with the Netflix change (Score:4, Informative)
Media distribution is a bit different from search engines, because it requires licensing deals for the content to distribute, which are often exclusive. It'd be one thing if Netflix and Company B both distributed all the major films, and you got to choose which platform you preferred based on criteria such as privacy, quality of the software, price, customer service, etc. But in practice the media business is all based around exclusive licensing deals, so for any given movie, you will be able to get it from Netflix, or from Company B, but will not have a choice of both. And what's likely is over the medium term one of those two will come out on top, as they collect all the good deals and drive the other one out of business.
There are possible ways to deal with it, mostly by laws against exclusivity deals or "tying", but in a market that allows tying you end up with those kinds of lack of perfect competition.
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Well, they're not getting their ass kicked in the OS or Office markets. Let FOSS start taking a real bite of their pie there (because really, who else can afford to play until the monopoly is broken?) and maybe *then* they'll start substantially improving those products as well, instead of just keeping the treadmill going.
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Of course I want to remain as anonymous as this post. Why would I be okay with Netflix selling my anonymous viewing details simply because it opens the door for a competing company that will not sell or store viewing habits. Look at DuckDuckGo. That's capitalism. Provide people a service that can or be almost be as comparable, let the people decide which is better.
Who said anything about selling 'anonymized'(to the degree that actually works) viewing histories?
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Well, for one thing, Netflix had a contest a few years back that accidentally showed that you can't anonymize them if you have enough of the history to be useful, or at least that anonymization is more difficult than it would initially appear.
Why is this needed? (Score:1)
Why is a bill needed for this? We have the 4th amendment already!
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Unless it's encrypted perhaps?
That would allow a "reasonable expectation of privacy"
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Recent court cases have evidently set some bizarre and creepy precedents, then.
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More like the ECPA of 1986 didn't anticipate that we would en masse turn our private documents over to third party companies who happily data mine our privates for profit and at the same time expect these documents would be considered private in some way.
Silly behavior I think.
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Once you've willingly handed over your papers to a third party, though, it's now up to that third party, not you, what to do with them. If Facebook wants to blab to the FBI without a warrant, they're the property owners. They have 4th-amendment rights in searches of their servers, but you don't, because you don't own the servers.
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Once you've willingly handed over your papers to a third party, though, it's now up to that third party, not you, what to do with them.
Sure, but we can still decide whether any evidence the government collects from these third parties is applicable in court if it collected it without a warrant. As it is, they can simply get all of the information they want from third parties as long as the third parties willingly give it to them, and I'm not sure if it's wise to allow the government to have such a power.
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Yeah, that I agree with. But those are statutory protections passed by a legislature; the 4th amendment doesn't compel HIPAA.
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and last i chcked WE were the government..
You work for the government?
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Because it is "on the internet". And as we've seen time and again, "on the internet" trumps petty, meaningless things like that consti... constipation? whatever.
Because of Petreaus (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's an example of how legal protections for privacy only get enacted when someone powerful gets screwed.
The timing sure makes this look like a reaction to the Petreaus scandal. From the news reports it sounds like the only reason Petreaus got caught is because of what had been basically carte blanche for the FBI to dig through any webmail system. Under normal circumstances the FBI should not have been investigating random threatening emails to a civilian - it was only because the civilian knew an FBI agent that wanted to bone her that the FBI even got involved. It seems implausible that a judge would have issued a warrant under those circumstances, but the FBI didn't need one under current law.
It's been 25 years, long enough that most people don't remember Robert Bork's supreme court nomination casuing his video rental records to become embarrasingly public and ultimately resulting in the passage of the Video Privacy Protection Act. So its not much of a surprise that the VPPA is getting dismantled - despite the actual threat being worse today since everything is in massive centralized databases now instead of paper records in a local store.
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Bork's records were a direct result - largely because Bork wanted to expand executive power, and claimed that people had limited privacy rights.
The timing in this case does make it look suspiciously related, but you missed the point. It was not related to Petreaus. This is fear of their own mails being released and searched.
In the Bork case, it was probably an employee who handed over a hand written list to a reporter, to prove a point. And the punishment was only $2500. In this case, it is the DOJ who
Netflix (Score:2)
the bill also reduces the protections of the Video Privacy Protection Act in order to allow Netflix et al to sell your viewing history.
Just who does Netflix think they are, anyways? The internet is not, like, a big truck that they can just use to spy on everyone.
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My understanding is that it lets Netflix share individual information if you give consent.
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But of course. (Score:2)
All senators want their email left under lock and key at all times. Since they can't be exempt, better law-it!
I'm serious.
I have a better idea (Score:3)
Encrypt everything.
Patriot act/NSLs/gag orders don't work unless a third party has goods able to be surrendered.
Requiring keys to be coughed up from data owner (still) requires notification to the owner and a court order.