Frank Slootweg <this@ddress.is.invalid> wrote on 16 Jul 2005 10:17:25
GMT:

> In comp.security.misc, Doc <docsavage20@xhotmail.com> wrote:
>> Someone brought up the idea of gov't monitoring of e-mail. I'm not a
>> tech, but clearly to do this, they'd have to be in the transmission
>> chain somewhere. Is this done or is it just an urban legend? Can ISP's
>> be compelled to allow a government agency to tap in to their system,
>> and do so without warning to the users of the ISP?

> "a governement" is rather broad. I assume you live in the US, so this
> may not (yet) be relevant, but the European Union (EU) countries are
> contemplating archiving e-mail (and web and phone) "traffic data". What
> "traffic data" is exactly, nobody knows, *including* the involved
> governements :-(, but for e-mail it will probably include 'who' sent a
> message to 'whom' with which Subject: at which date/time. I put
> "who[m]" in quotes, because the concept of a sender and recipient
> *person* doesn't really exist in e-mail.

> Besides this archiving of e-mail (and other) "traffic data", the Dutch
> governement is about to implement a "telephone directory" for Internet,
> which tries to tie IP addresses and e-mail addresses to people. The
> Internet professionals (association) in our country have explained that
> that can't be done, but wanting the impossible never stopped any
> governement, did it? :-( However with the recent events in London, I'm
> afraid this is going to happen, whether it actually helps or not and
> despite the cost.

I know, it's amazing, isn't it? If only governments had been able to
track every single email in the world, the bombings in London couldn't
possibly have happened, could they? Hmmm...

And it's a good job for these governments that Email's so secure and
open, that it's impossible to send a message without the sender and
recipient being trackable. Err...

And we can all rest assured that all of our governments merely want to
protect our safety, and that none of them are going to censor what we
want to say in any fashion, and that none of them are going to share our
correspondence with third parties.

And I just glanced out of my window, and watched a beautiful pig flying
by.

--
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").