Lamar Smith: Enemy Of The Internet? Defends Internet Snooping Bill

from the stop-smith dept

Before the SOPA mess heated up last year, we were just as worried about Rep. Lamar Smith's other ridiculous bill, in which he sought to hide massive data retention rules -- effectively requiring every online service provider to keep reams of data about users... and hid it all under a totally bogus claim that it was to "protect children from internet pornographers." This is the most cynical and obnoxious form of lawmaking: to pass something that is incredibly bad and dangerous and pretend that you're doing so to "protect the children from child porn" when the actual bill will do nothing of the sort. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who saw through Smith's ruse (as she did with SOPA as well), actually offered up an amendment to more accurately call the bill the "Keep Every American's Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act of 2011," but that got rejected.

Unfortunately, the bill, HR 1981, has already been voted out of committee (something that was successfully stopped with SOPA), so it could come to the floor at any time. As he did with SOPA opposition, Smith's staff is dismissing the online criticism of the bill, insisting is not as big as people are making it out to be... and that the complaints about the bill are not accurate. Yet, Demand Progress says that it has already received over 90,000 signatures against the bill, and lots of others are speaking out against it. Just as with SOPA, the opposition to such a bad bill does not fall along traditional political lines. You've got DailyKos on the left speaking out against it as well as patriot groups and Ron Paul supporters. And, of course, Reddit has been active as well.

In many ways this bill is significantly worse than SOPA, in that it not only creates a massive new problem for all internet companies, in that they would need to retain all sorts of data, but that it tries to hide it behind a claim that this is for protection against child porn -- something no politician wants to vote against. The costs of maintaining all this info can be quite large, but more importantly, this is the exact opposite of a privacy bill. It's an anti-privacy bill, because the more data that a company has to collect and retain, the more likely it is to leak or be accessed by someone who shouldn't have it (including the government -- which was the point of Lofgren's attempted renaming). Furthermore, the bill does absolutely nothing about the problem it actually claims to be targeting. Nothing in the bill would actually slow or stop child pornographers. The whole name is a red herring to try to get the bill through.

Between this and SOPA, it seems that people should start asking: is Lamar Smith the most anti-internet elected official in the US right now? He's got to be up there if he's not at the top.

Filed Under: data retention, lamar smith, privacy, snooping

Court Says College Can Snoop On Students' Email

from the no-privacy-violation dept

There have been plenty of cases where courts have said that it's okay for an employer to snoop on (employer-provided) employee email accounts. And now there's a case saying basically the same thing for colleges and universities. As long as they provided the email system, there's apparently no violation of anti-snooping or data privacy laws. I definitely understand the reasoning here, though one might argue that the relationship between a student and a university is quite different than an employee and employer. And I could see how students might have a much higher expectation of privacy. Still, do students really use university email addresses any more, or do they have their own primary email accounts that they had before heading off to school?

Filed Under: college, email, privacy, snooping, universities

Ex-Employer Has To Pay Former Employees $4,000 For Email Snooping

from the watch-where-you-snoop dept

We've discussed a bunch of cases lately involving employers and the legality of reading emails of employees. The latest one is a bit strange. It involves the owner of a gym, who had two ex-employees set up a competing gym. Somewhere along the way, she became aware of some emails they wrote while still employed by her, planning out their new gym. It appears that this is because they accessed their private email accounts via the gym's computers, but left their accounts logged in. After a variety of back-and-forth maneuverings, the employer has been forced to pay $4,000 to the ex-employees for snooping on their emails, in violation of the Stored Communications Act. Of course, what's most interesting is that if the employer had wanted to get access to those emails legally, she could have probably used the normal discovery process during a lawsuit -- but by snooping, she ended up not being able to use those emails in her own lawsuit, and owing those ex-employees a few thousand dollars.

Filed Under: email, snooping, stored communications act

Canadian Insurance Company Snooped On Jurors Insurance Claims During Trial

from the that-seems-bad dept

We've seen it over and over again -- when people have access to large databases of information, it's almost impossible for them to resist the temptation to abuse the info. The latest example comes via Michael Scott, who points us to the news that the Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC) was caught checking its own database to examine the claim histories of potential jurors in a trial in which the company was involved. Not surprisingly, this is a massive breach of Canadian privacy laws and also raises questions about the jury itself. The judge in the case is now trying to find out if ICBC has done this in other cases as well. ICBC seems to be bending over backwards to say this won't happen again and that it's put in place safeguards, but it's not clear why it happened in the first place.

Filed Under: canada, insurance, jury, snooping
Companies: icbc

RIM Tells India That It Simply Cannot Snoop On Blackberry Email

from the so-sorry dept

A few months back, we noted that the Indian government was demanding that RIM let government officials snoop on emails sent via Blackberry devices, or they would be banned in India. I'm not sure why it took so long for RIM to point this out, but it finally has explained to the government the nature of its encryption scheme which means that RIM itself cannot decrypt messages sent via the network, since they're based on an encryption key set up by the end user. It's not clear how India is going to respond, though the article notes the two sides are "talking."

Filed Under: blackberry, email, encryption, india, snooping
Companies: rim

IRS Employees Caught Snooping On Tax Returns

from the nice-to-see-someone's-checking dept

Last week, in writing about the Italian government's defense of its decision to put everyone's tax returns online for everyone else to see, we noted the bizarre statement by the official who made the decision: "In the USA, tax filings are already public, check any American TV-movie and you'll see." This totally false statement didn't get much play in the American press (someone in the comments suggested that maybe it seemed so unbelievable that the press thought he was joking). However, as if to make it painfully clear how false this statement actually is, five IRS employees have been charged for snooping on tax returns they were not authorized to look at. While it is a little troublesome that IRS employees were able to do this in the first place, it's at least somewhat comforting that the IRS's auditing system seems to be able to catch people doing this, even when they're only looking at a very small number of unauthorized returns (each worker only looked at one to four unauthorized returns).

Filed Under: audits, irs, snooping, tax returns