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Posted on 05/26/2016 9:46:08 AM PDT by Swordmaker
A new Senate bill would let the FBI and other law enforcement agencies access the contents of any US citizen’s email without a court order during investigations. Instead, the FBI would need just a National Security Letter, which would force companies to provide email access to the agency without alerting the person who’s being investigated. The FBI can already access phone records without a court order, but that law doesn’t apply to email conversations.
The Senate Intelligence Committee approved the 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act on Tuesday, CNET reports. The bill will head to the full Senate now that it has passed the committee.
“The threats facing our nation continue to grow and this year’s legislation provides the Intelligence Community the resourcing and authorities it needs to keep America safe,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said in a statement.
Vice Chairman Dianne Feinstein added, “The threat of terrorism remains high, so it’s vital that we provide intelligence agencies with all the resources they need to prevent attacks both at home and abroad.”
Burr and Feinstein recently proposed an encryption backdoor law that received plenty of criticism.
Fortunately, not all the senators on the committee agree. “This bill takes a hatchet to important protections for Americans’ liberty,” Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement. “This bill would mean more government surveillance of Americans, less due process and less independent oversight of US intelligence agencies. Worse, neither the intelligence agencies, nor the bill’s sponsors have shown any evidence that these changes would do anything to make Americans more secure.”
I concur. If they want to read your e-mail, wouldn’t it just be easier to get a copy from the NSA?
> I suspect that this law is just codifying something they already do.
They’ve been reading emails for a long time.
In 1998 I was discussing encryption with a buddy about 30 miles away, so we went to a website in Sweden and downloaded a copy of PGP. After that, we each installed it and exchanged public keys, we sent one email. The email was short and basically said, “So this is encrypted email. Cool.” Within 16 hours we each received emails from the FBI stating that encryption systems from foreign sources were illegal and that we should remove them from our systems.
Definitely, Snowden’s leaks proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Book ciphers would make sense to use to prevent prying eyes from reading your mail. They’re cumbersome but since they’re one-time pads they’re virtually unbreakable.
From personal experience… I guarantee you, that the government already reads your emails.
We now live in a nation with a Constitution that means no more than toilet paper...
The Police State marches on. We have no privacy. 100 years from now we will have no rights.
That’s exactly what I was going to say.
In that case I’ll need a program that sends tens of thousands of emails to and from my email account daily. A private key can filter out the ones I want to read.
This is a textbook example of a slippery slope. While typical content and user presentation schemes may vary, there really is not much technical difference between various communications methods. If you look at email, texts, snapchat, instagram, twitter, YouTube, other social media sites, even forums like FR here with private messaging... Fundamentally they all just exchange digital data (text, still imagery, audio/video) in a "store and forward" distribution scheme with the data stored remotely on third-party servers. Most have some way for the user to control who has access to the content. Even voicemail is just digitized audio.
So if you're going to allow the government access to any one of these formats of data, there is no real difference and you are giving them access to it all. They may only be looking for access to email for now. But then the case will be made at some point to allow similar access one or more, or all, of the other forms. Because fundamentally there is no difference - it's just packaging and presentation.
While acts of a de facto incumbent of an office lawfully created by law and existing are often held to be binding from reasons of public policy, the acts of a person assuming to fill and perform the duties of an office which does not exist de jure can have no validity whatever in law.
An unconstitutional act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation as inoperative as though it had never been passed.
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