Secret Text in Senate Bill Would Give FBI Warrantless Access to Email Records | Hacker News Reader

Secret Text in Senate Bill Would Give FBI Warrantless Access to Email Records

theintercept.com

175 pointsJumpCrisscross44 comments

"Blah blah national security just this one time in this focused fashion. Plus we've been doing it for 5 years already..."

Fast forward 10 years...

"Blah blah national security just this one time in this focused fashion. Plus we've been doing it for 5 years already."

Fast forward 20 years...

"...intelligence bill will give the FBI the right to enter your house and confiscate your possessions, without a warrant, in total secret..."

Don't forget the "we need a balance" statements, even though it's the U.S. government that has long moved away from that balance, and now just wants to be able to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants it, to whoever it wants, with no oversight.

The worst part is we just have to slowly watch it happen. As Snowden says, our ability to meaningfully oppose the state has been undermined.

Every "balance" argument is a strait up con. http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/...

I hate when balancing tests are invoked when the law is clear on its face.

But the 4th amendment is different than the 1st and the 2nd. It has balancing built into it, by only prohibiting "unreasonable" searches and seizures. It's as if the 1st amendment said "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of reasonable speech" or if the 2nd amendment said "the right of the people to keep and bear arms reasonably, shall not be infringed."

And this is why we need SCM-level tracking for our laws.

> And this is why we need SCM-level tracking for our laws.

That'd be great. Each commit would be pushed by the attesting legislator and they could even put the corporate lobbyist that actually wrote the change in the author field!

And suddenly everyone would understand how to use git blame.

And at some point people would start referring to proposed laws by their commit hashes.

"The Senate hearing over controversial bill 4ad57b ..."

> "The Senate hearing over controversial bill 4ad57b ..."

Ha! That'd be a nice side effect this approach.

Taking the concept one step further, there should be a CI environment to test out new laws.

One problem there is riders. Bills are a big mishmash of everybody's favorite pork and loophole fests instead of being a nice isolated single story commit. This leads to no end of treachery later. For one thing, it means you can smear someone for voting either _for_ or _against_ the same bill. For another, places without line-item-veto are screwed.

Why SCM-level? Wikipedia does it; why can't the Congress?

Because it's against their interests to make the creation of laws simple and transparent, because it would remove a lot of their ability to sneak in things like this to push a hidden agenda.

When you can push your own (or your sponsors') interests in relative secrecy, transparency is anathema.

Oh, I know why they do it. My point was that the solution isn't complicated; it's been out there, working, for more than a decade.

Knowing the level of technology parts of the government are stuck with, they'd start using Visual SourceSafe.

Makes sense, it has corruption built in.

Well, if they use Word, then I guess we're fresh out of luck because that problem is yet to be solved.

And no, one does not simply suggest to a business person (or politician) that they should learn "markdown" or LaTeX...because reasons.

>... such as email subject lines and other metadata ...

How could subject lines possibly be considered metadata? It is quite clearly content.

At some point, some court will just decide that the email body constitutes meta data

Technically speaking, they are part of the mail header along with metadata such as date, recipient, priority etc.

Because calling them metadata provides the government with an argument that minimizes their importance, thereby allowing them to be exploited for nefarious purposes in the same way that calling torture "enhanced interrogation techniques" allows it to be exploited for nefarious purposes. And so we get stuck arguing over the definitions of words instead of the actual actions being performed under those definitions.

"We Kill People Based on Metadata" -- former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden

Bruce Schneier's take on the distinction between "data" and "metadata": https://www.wired.com/2015/03/data-and-goliath-nsa-metadata-...

.. and because "metadata" is something most people don't understand.

How is this constitutional? I thought the courts have already clearly ruled that emails are private and therefor require a warrant.

It could take years for any case to reach the Supreme Court. In the mean time they can surveil away, and when/if the Nine (or will it still be Eight?) rule it back, no one will be punished. Win!

They have not. Only emails you hold yourself are protected under the Constitution. Emails held by third parties like Gmail are subject to the third party doctrine and therefore have no constitutional protections. They still have some statuary protections which this bill is actually expanding (mostly besides this part).

Is there a market for email server software with UX akin to Sandstorm, then (i.e. easy to install / self-maintaining), or would this apply to EC2 servers just as it does to email?

If so, a simple physical mail server with a battery / cellular network connection for power or network outages seems like a good technical solution.

The more reasonable solution is a legal one, of course: treat treat third party email the same way one treats a third party mailbox (PO box). Safety deposit boxes are a good comparison, as well: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/microsoft-tells-u...

I would guess/hope something like this is on the sandstorm roadmap but I don't know.

https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/email/

Running a Sandstorm instance in your home with backup network / power is a separate story, however.

As long as it is for personal use I at least don't feel the need for redundant power or network.

I also ran a sandstorm instance locally for a few months and it was boring in a good way.

God, is Ron Wyden (D.Ore) the only one reading and disclosing these things?

Probably. Most senators do not read the bills. They get a sparknotes like summary by a private company and they read that.

I think more visualization and ML tools like this are going to made available to cull through data like too http://52.11.211.67/recommend/chart-discovery/data/clusters/...

Encrypt Everything.

"Hi, I'm F. Beeye. Please give us all your passwords, or you will be imprisoned until you do."

... or we'll hit you with this rubber hose until you tell us. https://xkcd.com/538/

The only effective countermeasure is for everyone to encrypt everything. Unless you wan to get half of the population to torture the other half in shifts...

Sure, but then they have to do that, they can't just passively snoop everything. Beating someone with a hose until they talk has different PR implications than than secretly picking their locks and reading their mail.

There is no fighting the future, by political processes. There is only subversion.

Run your own mailserver, in your home or a semi-trusted local colo. Full disk encryption, fully encrypted offsite backups. Cabinet door reed switch triggers immediate power-down in the absence of a cryptographically signed override.

Running your own SMTP server at home is a pain in the ass, so it will never be widely adopted. I could easily move my mail server from Linode to my home connection, yet I won't. It's simply nicer to not have to worry about bouncing or delayed emails during power outage or network maintenance. And even if I did, the messages still come in plain text - we're only a few steps away from "email search" meaning "search of NSA's email records".

What we've really got is a protocols/software/UI problem. The end-to-end nature of the Internet came out of engineering sense, which was necessary to bootstrap it but not necessary for its continued functioning (hence it's slide back toward centralization eg DPI gear). What we need are better protocols that explicitly protect the end-to-end principle.

One should be able to have an untrusted cloud "mail server" that knows only what it needs to, passing messages to a slightly more trusted home server (your half-hardened hardware is really only protected by it's unique nature, so not scalable). A message only needs to be fully unlocked when it is being read. And the system needs to work this way out of the box with a minimum of configuring, because sysadmin work is an annoyance when you're just trying to get something done.

> Running your own SMTP server at home is a pain in the ass, so it will never be widely adopted.

It is, but it doesn't have to be. Someone could make a <$100 device which has a power backup for running through power outages and a backup network connection via the cellular network, which should provide high enough uptime for all practical purposes. Messages between mail servers are encrypted most of the time, more and more so every year [1]. This is a technical solution for a legal problem, though.

I'm not sure if I understand the system you are proposing, but email protocols seem secure enough now as they are now, it's just the third party principle that doesn't align with the obvious expectations of privacy in mail [2]. To me, it's pretty clear that my email account is like a PO box. Just because my email is held by a third party doesn't make it any less private than being delivered to my home, just as mail arriving at a "third-party" PO box isn't all that different from my mailbox.

1. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/ 2. http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/30/google-will-also-stop-scann...

Huh. I like your PO Box analogy. We should get the USPS to run mail servers.

It is not "a legal problem". It is a problem with legal, technical, governance (and probably more types of) approaches. If you're working on a legal solution I'll support you, just like if someone else succeeds in neutering the traitors in DC/VA, I'll cheer them on. But I am not a lawyer nor a soldier, so I'll remain focused on finding technical solutions.

Protocols "seem" secure enough, because you don't seem to be focused on the technicals (which is fine, as per what I just said. Just don't nay-say). For example, even if messages are encrypted between servers, the graph of who is talking to who is still revealed to a passive adversary, and this problem only gets worse with individually-run servers.

Hiding "who is talking to whom" against a global passive adversary is an active area of research and I don't know of any solution that is backwards compatible with email. Is this so of the one you are suggesting?

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