Press Release Content / Editorial

E-Surveillance Expands at Expense of Personal Privacy

[Date] - [City] – In reaction to 9-11, governments worldwide are casting what amounts to a global electronic dragnet to monitor, record and retain personal e-mail communications.  But will this new brand of super surveillance do more damage than good?

Some privacy-minded individuals believe that it will not be the wary international criminal that will be compromised by blanket governmental scrutiny.  Rather, it will be the innocent and unsuspecting citizen whose personal and business communications will be captured and databased.

Virtually borderless systems and networks are now on track to monitor and retain not only the headers and content of e-mails, but also individual Web surfing habits, fax transmissions and more.  Of those initiatives known to the public, a few examples:

• Pursuant a plan drawn up by Europol, the police and intelligence arm of the European Union, the European parliament recently passed the so called “Data Protection Directive.”  This measure will require that for a period of up to two years, ISP’s and telecom firms within the EU retain their customers e-mail message headers, Web surfing tracks, chat logs, pager records, newsgroup activity and all personal info associated with the user’s account; including user names and passwords.

• In accordance with a new surveillance law now effect in Switzerland, a record of every e-mail transmitted in and out of that country will be logged and stored for at least six months.

• In the UK, the “Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act” allows government security agencies to access electronic communications which ISP’s and telecoms are required by law to intercept and store; including e-mail messages, Web surfing tracks and fax transmissions.

• The Spanish Senate intends to force ISP’s to maintain a record of their customers' Internet activity for a year and, upon demand, make that information available to law enforcement agencies.

• In New Zealand the Government introduced “Supplementary Order Paper 85,” thus allowing the interception of electronic communications by police, the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau.

• In early 2002, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft directed the FBI to expand "data mining" and Web browsing surveillance.  Authorization for this covert scrutiny of personal communications and habits can now be secured without the subject being suspected of criminal activity.

• The FBI’s e-mail monitoring program, Carnivore (now relabeled with the lower-profile, “DCS1000”) continues to collect messages sent by and to U.S. citizens who may not even be the subject of an FBI probe.

• The FBI's mostly secret spyware, Magic Lantern, designed to nest within and monitor the subject’s computer, will (or already has) come online.

• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing an A-Z e-communications surveillance program disturbingly titled “Total Information Awareness” (TIA).  Project directives are described as the "total reinvention of technologies for storing and accessing information ... data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes."

The problem with e-surveillance on such a massive scale, according to [Company Exec], a security consultant and Senior VP of Development for [City]-based e-mail encryption service, [Client Company].com, is that in the name of fighting terrorism, put at risk will be the rights, freedoms and economic well being of those citizens ostensibly being protected.

“We live in an age in which 30-year FBI veterans sell out their country and 16-year-old hackers penetrate top secret government databases.  Whether an individual accessing a system like TIA is a government employee out to quash dissent or sell secrets, or a hacker targeting a bank account, you can be sure that systems and databases will eventually be misused.

Some in government believe that providers of highly secure, encrypted e-mail services, like [Client Company].com, may serve as conduit for criminal planning and plotting.  But this would seem an unfounded assumption.

While the long-term e-mail accounts of law-abiding citizens are tracked and retained, it can be assumed that international criminals will prove at least as crafty as the average spammer.  If e-mail is to be used in the plotting of a crime, it is likely that the plotters will simply take two minutes to establish a no-cost, anonymous e-mail identity with Yahoo, Hotmail, or one of countless other smaller providers.  Then, after each coded message is sent from the corner Internet café – no doubt omitting criminally-inclined keywords – the account will be abandoned.

This anonymity and ease of creating and abandoning an account is simply not a tactic applicable to a paid, identity-specific supplier of totally secure, highly encrypted e-mail.

[Client Company] and its legitimate competitors insure the confidential exchange of their clients’ personal and business communications.  An underground terrorist is not likely to offer up a credit card – especially a suspect credit card – then include other required corresponding, traceable information.  Why bother?

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