Thread: Legislation Would Prevent Government From Accessing Your Email & Other Private Inform

Legislation Would Prevent Government From Accessing Your Email & Other Private Information Without a Warrant

Written on Thursday, September 26, 2013 by Candice Lanier



The Fourth Amendment grants the government the right to conduct searches and seizures if it can persuade a judge it has probable cause that a crime has been committed. This has been the framework for law enforcement officials since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.

What may come as a surprise to many is that the rules restricting the NSA are actually stricter than the rules for local police departments. In order to read individuals’ email or obtain their documents stored online, the NSA needs an order from a judge. On the other hand, local police, the DEA, and the IRS, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA), have claimed a warrant isn’t needed. ECPA reform would fix that.
Laws protecting Americans’ privacy online have not been updated since 1986, years before the Internet was widely used by the public. So, police are able to view any email older than 180 days without a warrant. Civil liberties groups argue that laws need to be overhauled in order to protect Fourth Amendment rights, which in turn would prevent police from carrying out unreasonable searches and seizures. “This is an important issue because it’s a core constitutional issue. Right now the government is using ECPA [The Electronic Communications Privacy Act] to obtain Americans’ emails without a probable cause warrant,” said Mark M. Jaycox, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
The EFF is one of the 29 civil liberties organizations who launched the online advocacy campaign known as “Vanishing Rights.” The project’s goal is to raise awareness in regard to this issue and to urge Congress to overhaul the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
The law does prohibit warrantless access to various types of electronic communication, including “signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce.” The problem is that the Internet didn’t really become a prominent feature in U.S. homes until the mid to late 1990s. According to the Pew Internet Project, in 1995 only 10 percent of U.S. homes had Internet access and that was nine years after the law was passed.
The FBI guide states, “. . [I]f the contents of an unopened message are kept beyond six months or stored on behalf of the customer after the email has been received or opened, it should be treated the same as a business record in the hands of a third party, such as an accountant or attorney,” Consequently, if an individual prints out an email, the police would need a probable cause warrant in order to obtain a copy of the correspondence. But, they are free to read any email online as long as it’s at least 180 days old.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is in agreement with the argument that email is protected by the Constitution. Congress simply needs to follow suit and reaffirm Americans’ core constitutional rights. But, email is just one element of the overall problem. The ACLU has reported that a bevy of correspondences on social media are also unprotected from warrantless government surveillance.
There is currently a proposal in Congress that would do just that. The Email Privacy Act is currently being debated in the House of Representatives and already has 137 co-sponsors — 96 Republicans and 41 Democrats. In addition to that, a law was recently passed in Texas which requires law enforcement to get a warrant before accessing email. California and Massachusetts also have similar legislation pending.
There are tools law enforcement can use to make suveillance a lot easier. So-called “open source intelligence” (OSINT) is becoming prevalent, and not just at the national/international level. New tools now perform the mining of everything from Facebook posts to tweets, so that law enforcement and corporations can see what the locals are saying.
Due to the vast amount of social media posts, some tools don’t even attempt to provide a complete picture while others do. Enter BlueJay, the “Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner,” which provides real-time, geo-fenced access to every single public tweet. Local police are able to monitor #gunfire, #meth, and #protest (actual examples) in their respective jurisdictions. BlueJay is a product of BrightPlanet. BrightPlanet’s tagline is “Deep Web Intelligence” and the board of directors includes people such as Admiral John Poindexter.
But, the technology can also be used on a wider scale. BlueJay recommends using the tool to, “monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals” in order to “identify potential witness and indicators for evidence” and “track department mentions.”
Much has changed technologically since 1986. Now, progressively more of our personal information, business documents, and communications are stored online. It is not uncommon to find well over a years’ worth of email in webmail accounts, in addition to private photos, calendars, drafts and many other sensitive materials. It’s up to Congress to act now and make the needed revisions to existing, yet dated, privacy laws. Otherwise, government agents will continue to access this information without a warrant.



Read more at http://patriotupdate.com/articles/legislation-prevent-government-accessing-email-private-information-without-warrant/#tWvdeZFJGTqk6pTf.99

We already have that protection in place those who ignore it are doing so illegally and with out just cause it is in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, those are the laws needing to be enforced. What do they want Congress to do now??? I wouldn't trust "Congress" with emptying the trash let alone try and change our rights that are already in place. They only enforce what they want to enforce and ignore what they want to ignore....they could care less about our "rights"

Greenwald on ‘coming’ leak: NSA can obtain 1bn cell phone calls a day, store them and listen

Published time: June 29, 2013 20:03
Edited time: July 01, 2013 10:42

An undated aerial handout photo shows the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters building in Fort Meade, Maryland (Reuters)



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The NSA has a “brand new” technology that enables one billion cell phone calls a day to be redirected into its data hoards and stored, according to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who said that a new leak of Snowden's documents was ‘coming soon.’
Calling it part of a “globalized system to destroy all privacy,” and the enduring creation of a climate of fear, Greenwald outlined the capabilities of the NSA to store every single call while having “the capability to listen to them at any time,” while speaking via Skype to the Socialism Conference in Chicago, on Friday.

Greenwald was the first journalist to leak Snowden’s documents, having travelled to Hong Kong to review them prior to exposure.

“What we're really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without its being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency,” he said.

While he underlined that the NSA are not necessarily listening in on the full billion calls, he pointed out their capability to do so and the lack of accountability with “virtually no safeguards” which the NSA were being held to.

The Guardian journalist made hints that he was sitting on further details of the NSA’s billion-call backlog, which he’d keep under wraps until the documents full publication, which he said was “coming soon.”

He additionally suggested future exposures to come from Snowden, while lauding the sheer risk the whistleblower took in revealing the NSA’s covert surveillance program.



People cross a street in front of a monitor showing file footage of Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), with a news tag (L) saying he has left Hong Kong, outside a shopping mall in Hong Kong (Reuters / Bobby Yip)



“More a recluse than a fame whore”


Greenwald spoke highly of Snowden throughout, saying that the he apparently lacked remorse, regret and fear, while not seeking notoriety of any form.

“He’s a person who has zero privilege, zero power, zero position and zero prestige, and yet by himself he has literally changed the world,” Greenwald said of Snowden, using him as an example of the powers individuals still have.

“Courage is contagious,” he said, commenting on the demonization of whistleblowers, and saying it was necessary as Snowden could potentially set an example – something that Snowden himself aimed to do, as he had been looking for a leader to fix the problems inherent in the US system, but found nobody.

“There is more to life than material comfort or career stability…he thought about himself by the actions he took in pursuit of those beliefs,” said Greenwald.

He outlined his meeting with the NSA whistleblower, who he said contacted him anonymously via email suggesting Greenwald might be ‘interested’ in looking over the documents – a suggestion labeled by Greenwald to be “the world’s largest understatement of the decade.”

After Snowden sent Greenwald an “appetizer,” of the documents he had on hand, Greenwald recalled being dizzy with “ecstasy and elation.”


Satellite dishes are seen at GCHQ's outpost at Bude, close to where trans-Atlantic fibre-optic cables come ashore in Cornwall, southwest England (Reuters / Kieran Doherty)



“Climate of Fear”


It was Snowden’s exposure of the documents while operating in a highly surveilled environment that Greenwald was particularly complimentary about, citing an intensifying “climate of fear” being pushed on people who may be hazardous to the government.

“One of the things that has been most disturbing over the past three to four years has been this climate of fear that has emerged in exactly the circles that are supposed to challenge the government…the real investigative journalists who are at these outlets who do real reporting are petrified of the US government now. Their sources are beyond petrified,” he commented.

He called Friday’s scandal over the US army’s blocking of the Guardian website a prize of “a significant level above” a Pulitzer of a Peabody, pointing out the seeming contradiction that soldiers fighting for the country were considered mature and responsible enough to put their lives on the line, but clearly weren’t ‘mature’ enough to be exposed to the same information that the rest of the world was accessing.

“If you talk to anybody in journalism or in the government, they are petrified of even moving. It has been impossible to get anyone inside the government to call us back,” said Greenwald, throwing some thought on the possible reasoning behind people contacting the press regarding the actions of government.

“If you look at who really hates Bradley Manning or who has expressed the most contempt about Wikileaks or who has led the chorus in demonizing Edward Snowden, it is those very people in the media who pretend to want transparency because transparency against political power is exactly what they don’t want,” he opined.


A general view of the large former monitoring base of the U.S. intelligence organization National Security Agency (NSA) in Bad Aibling south of Munich (Reuters / Michaela Rehle)



Greenwald finished by pointing out the increasing reluctance for people in government to even communicate with journalists, while highlighting the usage of the mass surveillance program to keep an eye on both dissident groups and Muslim communities.

“There’s a climate of fear in exactly those factions that are most intended to put a check on those in power and that has been by design,” Greenwald stated, saying that Snowden was a prime example that people could stand up to the government, and that there was no need to be afraid of publishing “whatever it is we think should be published in the public good.”

Reuters / Pawel Kopczynsky

http://rt.com/usa/nsa-greenwald-call-store-427/