Worried about government eavesdropping on your e-mails? Hushmail allows you to communicate securely with other Hush users. Unless the government is involved. The guy who created PGP said the company only undoes encryption when given a court order and is not turning over customer records wholesale to government agencies. But who needs a court order?
posted on Nov 21, 2007 - View this thread

Security, the TSA, and the No-Fly List You would think that our National Security apparatus would be like the TV series "24", with the most ingenious and sophisticated technology available. You would be wrong. Disclaimer: TSA is not an intelligent intelligence agency. Here's a blurb from the resume of the designer(Kenneth Mack) of the application the airline industry uses for *PDF* managing their employee data and the cross-checking them with the no-fly list:

- Sr. Developer: Developed a program [for Goddard Technologies] that uses the "No-Fly List" Excel spreadsheet, provided by the FAA and the database of badged employees to permute the name combinations. It takes into consideration multiple first and middle names, with Soundex and the various "initial" combinations. This program reduced the time for comparison from 3 days to 10 minutes.

The scary yet interesting part of all of this is that the No-Fly List is nothing more than a password-protected spreadsheet (see this PDF). One would guess our Government's geeks would know that it's a bad idea to send email attachments containing social security numbers and dates of birth, unencrypted, over the internets, even if they might be terrorists.
posted on Jul 15, 2005 - View this thread

E-mail snooping is legal. A U.S. federal appeals court set an unsettling precedent last week by ruling (PDF) that an e-mail provider did not break the law when he copied and read e-mail messages sent to customers through his server.
posted on Jul 7, 2004 - View this thread

What are the ethics of forwarding an e-mail you were not mean to receive? What if it is sure to humiliate the sender? What if it ends up entertaining untold numbers of people around the globe?
posted on Sep 16, 2002 - View this thread

ALL YOUR EMAIL ARE BELONG TO US! How serious is this threat? What precautions do you routinely take? What precautions do you think you *should* be taking? What viable options do we have today, for those of us who aren't computer programmers by profession? And how secure are they, anyway?
posted on May 30, 2001 - View this thread

Do you use Hotmail for email? If so, it looks like Microsoft owns all your messages and can reprint or repurpose them however they like. I'd assume the ToS could be extended to cover any content on a passport-using website as well. Scary stuff, considering all the Hailstorm services on the way...
posted on Apr 3, 2001 - View this thread

DC Police email scandal. The District of Columbia put computers in patrol cars and encouraged email use to help keep lengthy communication off the radio waves. Instead, a recent audit of department emails showed that many officers used it to send "racist, vulgar and homophobic messages" to each other. Further complicating matters, it appears this might create legal problems for the police -- defense lawyers can undermine officer credibility, convictions may be reviewed for civil rights violations, and the department may be subject to "hostile work environment" lawsuits. Is this a privacy violation, or just another case of employees being too dense to realize that email sent on their employer's system should never be considered private?
posted on Mar 29, 2001 - View this thread

Wish I'd Said That Dept.
If the privacy-invaders are going to collect so much information on me, why can't they seem to USE IT?
posted on Jul 21, 2000 - View this thread

It is time for Louis Freeh to lose his job. Carnivore, indeed. This has got to stop.
posted on Jul 16, 2000 - View this thread

Never, NEVER, NEVER tell someone "Sure, you can use my computer while I'm on vacation!"
posted on May 3, 2000 - View this thread