now Sony wants access to your e-mail and cell phone recordsFollow

sorry that is complete and utter bullsh*t, do you honestly think that Sony really gives a f*ck what you are writing in your emails? or telling your mother for that matter?

The only reason you would ever appear on anyones radar so to speak is if you are doing something dodgy,

Be it international terrorism or downloading MP3 illgally either way i have exactly zero sympathy for you.

obey the law and buy your music legally and no one is even going to give you a second glance unless they are trying to sell you something.

Welcome to REALITY!

Big deal, so if you do something illeagal the police will have the power to retrospectively look at your phone calls....

Why is this a problem? it's not like the Police or anyone else has the time or compulsion to randomly "peeping Tom" your phone calls or emails for no reason.

Paranoid much?

This is about acsess IF REQUIRED by people who are trying to make the world a safer place, if you're a law abiding citizen there is almost no chance this power will be used reference you and even then you will most likely no know about it.

much to do about nothing in my opinion and if your truely worried that PC Plod is going to start randomly looking at your phone sex records, i think your safe Singdall.

ok so downloading mp3s is going to make the world less safe and thus companies have the RIGHT to take your freedom away from you because you are downloading mp3 files making the world unsafe for the rest of us???

******** and you know it.



its attitudes and inaction like that, that take freedom away from people. remember the "patriot act" it was the inaction of the US public that allowed for the loss of freedom.

FYI, it is not just your cell records, it is everything to include your web habbits, your e-mails both personal and business, were will it stop? do you really want to live under Big-Brother watching? this is what is happening.

now big-brother is going to be more then just the gov. it is going to be all the major corps around the world who are NOT held to any single gov. standard. they can do as they damn well please and no one is doing anything to stop them from stealing your freedoms.


and who is to say that any site or word you type is not going to trigger some computer or person types in the wrong letter and you become the target of the loss of your freedom? who then will be left to stand up for you when the law is that you have no freedom.

Edited, Sun Nov 27 16:24:32 2005 by Singdall

I think you need to think that statement through again.

who is stupid enough to use windows for a server? not i, that is for sure.

who cares if they track an IP address, that does not give them any information about the content of my e-mails.

-------------------------------------------------------------

hehehe,

sooo, all the e-mails you send go to people who also do not use windows?

beginning to see the error in your thinking? and you think red hat is any better? that thay wouldnt also put a back door in their system to access demographic information to better cater their product? or any other server softwear you can buy commercially?

if they want it, they will get it. if you dont want them having it, disconnect your computer from the internet.

if it makes you feel better to not give them permission to take what they already have, by all means lobby against it.

not saying it is good or bad, just saying it is.

personally, i approve of them being able to access e-mail and anything else they want. i would rather be embarassed about them discovering i ********** because of an e-mail than watch another few thousand people be killed. big bussiness will get and use the information with or without my permission anyway.

privacy is overrated. all anyone could possibly find out is im as human as anyone else.

LoL you reall do not know jack about how computer servers work do you.

A. just because the person who received it is on a windows system does not mean the gov. is going ot have an easy time at cracking a 4000bit encrypted PGP key.

B. LoL no REDHAT can not do what you sujest because their system is OPENSOURCE, that means everyone is able to read 100% of the code and would catch such a blatent act as a back door.



yes that is true, but as of right now they have to get it by breaking the LAW. hello, wake up people and smell the coffee, they are trying to make it so they do not have to break the law to get these things.


see above.


if they have it, then they have broken the law and can be fined and sent to jail, not to mention have their company **** canned.

gbaji, very well put as always.

still boils down to legality and ease of access.

I kinda came in late into this discussion, but people are missing the point. . . Yes, if sony really wants to they can access you information, but this is making it legal to do so. This will just be another freedom that has been taken away leading us closer to tyrany.

This is Private information, whether its legal or not, its private. The same reason that police cannot search your home without a warrant. It is your private living space. Its not as extreme as this but it is in the same ballpark.

Just because some people are breaking the law does not mean they have the right to trample over everyone's constitutional freedoms.

I know that someone has already said this but I think that people are completely missing the point of this discussion

my 2 cents

Um. No. It's actually not. Stuff you have stored on your personal computer is "private". It's physically located in your home, and held entirely on property you own (your computer hard drive and memory). An email you send out is *not* private. Not even a little bit. By what law do you think it is? You have sent a packet of data across wires owned by one company, to a server owned by another, crossing wires and servers owned by 50 or so other people, and ultimately ending up on a mail server owned by another company, to eventually get downloaded by an email client owned by the recipient of the email.

That's not even a little bit like your private living space. You don't own 99% of the hardware used to carry your email.

There are special laws protecting federal mail from being opened (ensuring privacy). But guess what? With a warrant, that mail can be read. Certainly, the records of your mail transactions can be obtained as well. And email, since it's not regulated by any government body is *also* not really protected by any government body either. It's "free". Guess what? Freedom doesn't come with guarantees of any kind. Don't send something in email if you don't want it read by someone else. It is not, nor has it ever been, private.



There are two components to the article that Singall linked.


- The law requiring service providers to keep records of transactions for a set amount of time. This isn't really that sinister. It's no different then your phone company records, or cable company records, or postal service records. All of which are already kept for a period of time specifically so that police can obtain them in case a warrant is issued and they are needed for legal reasons. Nothing particularly horrible about the idea. In fact, for those of us who have tried to catch and prosecute internet hackers and scam artists, the greatest block to following the trail is servers that don't keep records of transmissions.

Heh. I'll give you a little hint though, most servers keep records of everything they do. Most are automatically backed up. Most companies store their backups for years. So. Right now. Without any specific laws in effect, there's a good probability that with a warrant an email you sent 5 years ago (assuming you were sending email 5 years ago) could likely be retrieved. Odds are massively increased if that email originated or was recieved on any sort of corporate, government, or education institution server.


- Companies (like Sony) are seeking to use that law to allow them to pursue charges against people who've illegally copied material owned by them (or someone they represent). This is the bigger issue. However, while the author makes a huge distinction between using warrants to collect server history information in cases involving serious crimes and the less serious copyright violations, the fact is that legally there's no difference. If a crime is a felony, then it recieves the same odds of justifying warrants for searches as any other sort of crime.

That's where I kinda disagree with the author. While I'm not particularly happy with companies like Sony and how they go about things. They do have a legal point. Whether we like it or not, in the information age, knowledge itself has value. Data has value. Stealing that is no different then coming into my house and stealing a physical object. While I agree that the various media companies do need to adjust their business models to the new realities, I *also* can see that if IP cannot be legally protected then a whole lot of industries can have serious problems. The increased capability of making and transmitting copies of data does not just apply to things like music and videos (although those are pretty big issues by themselves). Prior to the internet, if someone wanted to steal my patented process for making wigits, they'd have to sneak someone in and walk out with the process. Likely to be some huge document and involve customized equipment, etc. Today, if you can get a copy of it, you can move that anywhere in the world instantly and make use of it. As manufacturing plants become more automated, this is pretty critical. Most things are designed on computer and then fabricated using relatively standard machines. If I can steal your data, I can pretty quickly build copies of whatever you're making and selling. And that's the kind of stuff that can break national economies if unchecked.


So yeah. It seems silly that they're going after little people for downloading songs and such, but the legal implications are much much broader then that. To me, the correct approach is to look into the definitions of copywrites on things like music in the first place. Businesses should be finding different ways to market their stuff that takes into account the fact that it's so ridiculously easy to copy and move around. We should not be attacking the tools used to track those crimes though, because those are the same tools that are needed to track the big industrial espionage cases. We should be looking at redefining the legal status for the small cases. If it is the authors contention that illegally copying and distributing copywrited material isn't a serious enough offence, then let's go about defining our laws to say it's not a serious offence and not one that allows for warrants to dig through computer records. But eliminating the tool itself is a bad idea.

just curious if gbaji has encountered freenet...

I used AOL once for about 3 months when we couldn't get cable.

I have never been more confused by the "ease" of something in my life.

I could go on, but I'll stop there.

IMO, AOL is teh suck.

No need to tell us buddy, we hear you.