Leahy’s rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.
If you want to know why I self-host everything, this is why. You want to look into my electronic affairs? Personal files? E-mail? Bring me a warrant. It’s also why I only use Facebook for platitudes and crap I don’t care if other people know.
Those sombitches will never stop their illegal grabs for power.
Self hosting is fine, until it leaves the house. Then it can be taken off at the provider.
That is or edges into wiretap territory. I can’t remember the current legal state of mail spools, but Federal judges tend to get these things right, especially since there are so many clear real world analogies (e.g. in this case, intercepting snail mail while at a Postal Service temporary holding location).
I was told that if I voted for McCain / Romney, that civil liberties in America would be under attack.
And they were right.
But I thought the Dems were for civil liberties and privacy and the evil Republicans were going to take them all?
Yikes! This is good to know. Thanks!
This is why I wish I could self-host, and go one step further: figure out how to create a decentralized, self-hostable version of things like Google Docs and Facebook.
I have ideas on how this could be done–for Docs, just use LibreOffice and/or text files and Git; for Facebook, it would take a bit more work–but I don’t have the time or resources to figure this out.
Every so often, I hope someone will see an idea like this, pick it up and run with it, and perhaps even get wildly rich in the process. And I’ll get to use a service that I’ll hopefully like, too!