[apnic-talk] Fourth and Last?
I apologize for the cross posts. This should be the last.
Rachel Luxemburg wrote (on the ISP/c list):
> Maybe I'm just being naive here, but why should this concern Joe/Jane
> Person unless he/she has something to hide?
>
> Rachel
>
Eric Weisberg replied:
Are you Jane?
Have you ever engaged in political or commercial activities that might be
of interest to someone else? I have.
As for your personal life, let me tell you that there are other
"interested" parties. The following may not apply other than to show
how people become "interested." You can extrapolate from there.
This month, Internet Texoma was asked to secretly forward to the father
all e-mail of his 16 yo daughter. The daughter was mailing from her mailbox
under the father's account. The father was involved in a nasty divorce from
the mother and wanted to know which side the girl was taking. Needless to say,
the
girl was probably communicating with other friends and relatives, expressing
her
private thoughts and they theirs.
You may not have anything to hide, but mothers with teenage children have
to worry about drugs in their homes, as an example of something in which
governmental authorities are interested.
I am representing a quadriplegic and her home health aid who were
terrorized by the raid of the quad's home by about 20 masked men pointing
semi-automatic
weapons at them, shouting, throwing the 300 lb aid on the floor and cuffing
her hands behind her back for 30 minutes while they searched the house only to
find five marijuana seeds in a pie tin under a sofa in an unused room. This
was on the basis of a tip from an unnamed informant. The quadriplegic lost her
home health care benefits for about 2 weeks while we convinced the state
health care agency that they should not enforce their rule against providing
home
health aids to residents of premises which are alleged to have been used for
drug
activity.
Last year, the Texas Attorney General illegally subpoenaed the e-mail and
everything
else relating to 27 members of the organization known as the Republic of Texas
in connection with a civil suit against the organization for filing false
tax liens issuing out of the Republic's "courts." Eight of the ten ISPs
recieving such
subpoenas complied without a question, sending boxes of materials to the AG.
Shortly afterwards, the AG got the court to issue contempt citations and
ordered a
raid of the Republic's leader's "compound" in the Davis mountains. The group
was
reputed to make heavy use of the Internet. What JP (or, indeed, federal
magistrate) would closely scrutinize requests for warrants to look at 100s
of peoples' e-mail at such a time? Remember, we are talking about the rights
of all the people who were communicating [including (if not predominantly)
conversations on
unrelated matters] with these political activists who were not suspected of a
crime.
You can give your own experiences.
Here is the bottom line. There is no "Jane." There are only people like
you living in an increasingly smaller space trying to be human. We have
entered a time in which monitoring is frighteningly effective and privacy
increasingly
at risk. We must recognize this danger and expose it before 1984 arrives
(read the book) and withdrawal from the trap impossible. No one will like
living
in this world if we don't!
Eric Weisberg, Gen. Counsel
Internet Texoma
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