Re: How would the government monitor your e-mail?

[I took the liberty to add comp.mail.misc because the subject matter may
also be of interest to the audience of that group. When responding, feel
free to set Followup-To: either group as I am subscribed to both.]

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?
>
> Another way I suppose would be an unscrupulous employee at an ISP. Any
> documented cases of this happening?

"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.

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").

In the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.misc, in article
<qf5dbd.46.ln@acm.acm>, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

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

>> 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.

According to the RIR Zonefiles, .nl has a total of 991 network blocks (7
from ARIN, 984 from RIPE) totalling 16488864 IPv4 addresses. The last I
looked, there were only 16.2e6 people in .nl, so that should be no problem,
right? Probably won't work in .an, as LACNIC has only allocated 34816
addresses for 1.8e5 people there.

>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...

Yup

>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 that the mail is in English text using only the ASCII character set.

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

Just one? I'm in the Southwestern USA, which has such good flying
weather that many nations send their Air Force trainees here for
training, and we're used to seeing huge formations of pigs flying
about.

Old guy