feature [priv] X-Mailer: Lonely Cat Games ProfiMail Reply-To: dave@farber.net ------- Original message ------- From: Steven M. Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> Sent: 28/4/'05, 7:58 In message <BE963F70.31465%dave@farber.net>, David Farber writes:

And just for an oldie but a goodie, let's remember that for those of us living in the USA, the Federal government can request and search your travel, phone, financial, and medical records, in addition to any records maintained by libraries, religious institutions, retailers (think Amazon, bookstores, video rental stores) without having to disclose anything to you.

It strikes me as likely that the government can obtain your search records from Amazon without even a minimal court order. Note the following item in Google's privacy policy: ? We conclude that we are required by law or have a good ? faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of ? such information is reasonably necessary to protect the ? rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the ? public. It's pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that they're allowed to comply with a simple FBI request: "we think that your user so-and-so is an evil terrorist; can we have his search and email records?" Sure sounds like a public safety issue, right? Or how about "we think that so-and-so is an evil file-sharer; can we have records of all of her searches for 'mp3' or 'kazaa'?" from the RIAA? That sounds like a property issue. But we can go a step further. Google is really good at finding information matches; what if they themselves develop a search profile that "identifies" a terrorist, a file sharer, or what have you? ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]