The Government is spying on your email and web surfing habits - Discussion
In January of this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF), a group dedicated to defending your liberties and privacy on the Internet, filed a Freedom of Information Act inquiry with the FBI and other Justice Department offices to ascertain if the U.S. government is spying on your email and web surfing habits.
The answer is almost a certain yes, and the EFF is seeking documents to learn if the government is using the provisions of the USA Patriot Act to collect information about the contents of your email and your online activities without a search warrant.
It would seem reasonable to expect that your online habits are private. Yet, the Justice Department refuses to confirm whether it collects or believes it is authorized to collect information about what you're doing online.
The USA Patriot Act was hastily passed by Congress shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It pretty much tramples the bill of rights and curtails many of the civil liberties we are supposed to enjoy as part of the "war on terror."
As part of the act, the government can monitor your Web surfing records, use roving wiretaps to monitor phone calls you make if you are "proximate" to a primary person being tapped, access your ISP's records about you, and monitor the private records of people involved in legitimate protests.
The Justice Department already claims the new definitions allow them to collect email and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. But, the agency has not been forthcoming about Web surveillance. It will not say whether it believes URLs (a web address like http://www.elitefitness.com) can be collected about you, despite the fact that URLs clearly reveal exactly what you're looking at on the Web.
The Patriot Act was passed to fight terrorism, but, it is not limited to terrorism. For example, government spying on suspected "computer trespassers" requires no court order. Wiretaps are now allowed for any suspected violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, opening the door to government spying on any computer user.
The Patriot Act also gives ISPs the authority to release private data if a person's life is in danger without a court order. The Justice Department does not publish statistics on the number of times it has accessed such information, according to its report to the congressional committee.
Further, the Patriot Act requires domestic ISPs to comply with secret "National Security Letters" from the FBI. These letters can request information about you including your home address, the telephone calls that you have made, your email subject lines and the logs of the websites that you visited. And even the privacy statements of the three major ISPs, AOL, MSN, and Earthlink, give them permission to intercept your email and monitor what you're looking at online.
In this week's EliteFitness.com News, I'll share with you some new and startling developments in the multiple attacks against your privacy. And I'll tell you more about how to get a free secure, encrypted, offshore, web-based email account and file storage and why you need it now more than ever.
To read more, please go to:
http://www.elitefitness.com/articledata/efn/031405.html
And please discuss Internet privacy and free secure, encrypted, offshore, web-based EliteFitness.com email in this thread. Who here uses it?
In January of this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF), a group dedicated to defending your liberties and privacy on the Internet, filed a Freedom of Information Act inquiry with the FBI and other Justice Department offices to ascertain if the U.S. government is spying on your email and web surfing habits.
The answer is almost a certain yes, and the EFF is seeking documents to learn if the government is using the provisions of the USA Patriot Act to collect information about the contents of your email and your online activities without a search warrant.
It would seem reasonable to expect that your online habits are private. Yet, the Justice Department refuses to confirm whether it collects or believes it is authorized to collect information about what you're doing online.
The USA Patriot Act was hastily passed by Congress shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It pretty much tramples the bill of rights and curtails many of the civil liberties we are supposed to enjoy as part of the "war on terror."
As part of the act, the government can monitor your Web surfing records, use roving wiretaps to monitor phone calls you make if you are "proximate" to a primary person being tapped, access your ISP's records about you, and monitor the private records of people involved in legitimate protests.
The Justice Department already claims the new definitions allow them to collect email and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. But, the agency has not been forthcoming about Web surveillance. It will not say whether it believes URLs (a web address like http://www.elitefitness.com) can be collected about you, despite the fact that URLs clearly reveal exactly what you're looking at on the Web.
The Patriot Act was passed to fight terrorism, but, it is not limited to terrorism. For example, government spying on suspected "computer trespassers" requires no court order. Wiretaps are now allowed for any suspected violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, opening the door to government spying on any computer user.
The Patriot Act also gives ISPs the authority to release private data if a person's life is in danger without a court order. The Justice Department does not publish statistics on the number of times it has accessed such information, according to its report to the congressional committee.
Further, the Patriot Act requires domestic ISPs to comply with secret "National Security Letters" from the FBI. These letters can request information about you including your home address, the telephone calls that you have made, your email subject lines and the logs of the websites that you visited. And even the privacy statements of the three major ISPs, AOL, MSN, and Earthlink, give them permission to intercept your email and monitor what you're looking at online.
In this week's EliteFitness.com News, I'll share with you some new and startling developments in the multiple attacks against your privacy. And I'll tell you more about how to get a free secure, encrypted, offshore, web-based email account and file storage and why you need it now more than ever.
To read more, please go to:
http://www.elitefitness.com/articledata/efn/031405.html
And please discuss Internet privacy and free secure, encrypted, offshore, web-based EliteFitness.com email in this thread. Who here uses it?
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