Responding to orders which include a secrecy requirement

[Tim May]

On Saturday, August 30, 2003, at 10:46  AM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> At 06:54 PM 8/29/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>> On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 03:28  PM, Steve Schear wrote:
>>> All covered in my previous postings.  This approach should be
>>> particularly applicable to ISPs as they generally have billing
>>> arrangement and can add this on as an extra service fee for each
>>> inquiry.  Instead of court orders being a cost they become a revenue
>>> source.
>>>
>> This has been proposed for, but it fails for the usual reasons.
>>
>> An ISP is free to say "anyone requesting a tap is required to pay a
>> fee," just as any ISP is free to say that it will handle installation
>> of special Carnivore equipment for a certain fee.
>
> My (perhaps flawed) reading of Steve's post was different from Tims: 
> the
> ISP bills the
> *tapped* person for "misc unplanned network work", not the *tappers*.
> The ISP puts it into their contract: if tapped by court order, we'll
> bill you for our effort.

I don't see any way to read what Steve wrote this way.

He said: "An ISP is free to say "anyone requesting a tap is required to 
pay a fee," just as any ISP is free to say that it will handle 
installation of special Carnivore equipment for a certain fee."

A customer of the ISP is certainly _not_ the one requesting a tap. And 
he is certainly not the one installing Carnivore equipment.

Q.E.D.

--Tim May


"According to the FBI, there's a new wrinkle in prostitution: suburban 
teenage girls are now selling their white asses at the mall to make 
money to spend at the mall.
...
Now, you see, the joke here, of course, is on White America, which 
always felt superior to blacks, and showed that with their feet, moving 
out of urban areas. "White flight," they called it. Whites feared 
blacks. They feared if they raised their kids around blacks, the blacks 
would turn their daughters and prostitutes. And now, through the 
miracle of MTV, damned if it didn't work out that way! "

--Bill Maher, "Real Time with Bill Maher," HBO, 15 August 2003