Posted on August 1st, 2010
The Washington post on Thursday published a report which states that a white house proposal is under consideration which would enable federal investigator unrestricted access to email records. The investigators would not require a court order as they did in the past.
Without giving any specific names or designations due to sensitive nature of the matter, the report cites that the government desires the Federal Bureau of Investigation should be legally allowed access without first procuring a judge’s order. If passed this proposal would add “electronic communication transactional records” to the increasing list of things FBI can freely access.
The proposal would allow access to complete details about the email such as the recipient address, time and date of receipt and sending and activity history of a user’s web browser. Mercifully, it would leave out the actual content of email and any other messages.
The supporter of this proposal hold the email detail info akin to telephone billing records already at the disposal of FBI agents without a court order. The proponents of change compare email detail to an ominous list of numbers contacted and the numbers from which calls were received.
The plea taken by government authorities to justify this proposal is that it would aid them in terrorist related or intelligence recon and that it would provide them with a tool to interject prior to a terrorist plot.
Critics have labeled the proposal an unjustified and undesirable increment in government’s power to snoop into personal information; if the campaign is halted it would mean more civil liberties related to national security according to the Post. This proposal would be directly applicable to National Security letters which FBI has the authority to send out on its own when requesting information in secret.
The result of increased access would be that service provider would have to divulge more information than usual. Quoting an unnamed official, the post states that right now most internet and email providers out rightly refuse to provide electronic records citing the surveillance law which dictates that they are not liable of producing such and handing over such records.
Another vehement opposition to the change is made on the grounds that the term “electronic communication transactional records” is unclear and vague and might be interpreted to include full browsing history of user and a detailed record of every download made. This viable point was put forth by Electronic Frontier Foundation known for their advocacy of privacy laws.
For the service providers, this is very risky and tricky ground to tread on because by refusing government’s request for provision of such information they might incur controversy and harsh criticism.
This fiasco was brought to public view last week when web hosting provider BurstNet decided to pull the plug on a customer running a free of cost blog hosting service. BurstNet received a tip off that the blog was being utilized to host bomb making manuals and contained a hit list possibly for use by terrorist and was being discussed on free speech conversation online. The service providers lament and cite the cost that they have to bear to retrieve and re-supply that information after the government legislation which seizes it.