Is there any email that is not surveiled by the authorities?

[DrStrabismus]

Originally Posted by drew

but it stills feel like we are going into a future
that George Orwell warned us about. Scary how accurate he was. he must have had a great intuition sensing what was a possible future based on his own personal experiences.

That's an absurd exaggeration.

[Tsunami]

Originally Posted by drew

Yes you are right. Naive question maybe more an emotional
outburst after reading the Guardian text on their latest story on how deep this goes. Not that I have anything to hide
but it stills feel like we are going into a future
that George Orwell warned us about. Scary how accurate he was. he must have had a great intuition sensing what was a possible future based on his own personal experiences.

We are not heading towards Orwellianism. We ARE in an Orwellian society as we speak. Just more sophisticated. If one still believes he is not watched, that no person or organisation has records on you, ... then this person is very naive.I think we would be surprised if we'd know how much data is collected about us. Freedom is mainly an illusion our governments try to "sell" for their own benefit and to scare us from the "evil enemy countries who don't respect human rights". Some of the worst human rights violators on earth are considered allies by the western world.

There are only 2 ways to correspond without surveillance:
- use an intranet rather than the internet. (downsides: you have to have an incredible knowledge to set up such thing, your friends have to all restrict themselves to this intranet too and abstain from using the regular internet too, and communication with the people not in your own intranet would be impossible)

- use one of those data havens such as the webhost which once existed with servers on Sealand. If your host for email is in a nation which is de facto Lawless or so corrupt that the police have better things to do than controlling email traffic... or if your mail is hosted in an unrecognised state which thus also is not bound to international rules on data collections... in that case you may be totally shielded from surveillance. But the instant you email someone with a regular "surveilled" account that won't help much, and also it is highly questionable whether a service in a de jure inexisting state or highly corrupt state is reliable at all (you may end up with bigger worries than the surveillance in the regular correspondence online)

I believe HavenCo was the Sealand based host, but I am unsure. The idea was that no laws regarding restricted content would matter, since Sealand jurisdiction did not forbid any content that was for example under copyright. And since Sealand is not recognised as a country the international laws would not apply. I think this webhost doesn't exist anymore though. The idea itself sounds a bit dodgy as well.

Originally Posted by communicant

In any case, why would anyone want to send from a service that is part of the web presence of *any* openly far-left or far-right group? Especially now, with data mining and official surveillance even more pervasive and intrusive than was previously known, this would not be a prudent thing to do, unless a sender happened to support the known views of a particular service and didn't mind being associated with those views by his choice of a service.

At the least, this sort of choice should not be made casually or in ignorance of the possible implications, especially nowadays. That is not paranoia, merely common sense, made even more relevant by the disturbing news of recent weeks.

It is not illegal to be left wing so I doubt legal consequences would be an issue. Outing your political preference is in the free world also legal. So the question is merely if the user is comfortable with using a service that is openly connected to a certain ideology (he may be if he follows this ideology himself, or if he assumed nobody he emails with will ask what the email address stands for)

Not sure what type of "disturbing news" you refer to, maybe I missed something in the papers, but I write very political emails regularly and I don't feel like this is problematic. Because I am not calling for actions or mass protests, simply out my opinion which (if it wasn't for the "no politics" rule) anyone may know. So I don't feel disturbed or unsettled by the idea that some organisation knows of my political preferences.

The one thing which would stop me from a host like autistici.org is that their terms of service regarding inactivity, storage, etc are very vague + they may just as well monitor emails and delete those whose political talk are not exactly what they like. As weird as it may sound, if you want to talk about politics, you are best off using a regular email provider (after all, regardless of data mining, it is legal to out your ideology)

[Tsunami]

As for mail.be ... I am Belgian. This week a new law was approved making it obligatory for ISPs to keep a track record of who emails to whom, which program or client was used or which operating system, and at what date and time. The content of the email does not have to be stored or monitored, only when the email was sent, from where and to whom. Nevertheless Belgians speak about the worst violation against privacy in our recent history.

Mail.be may host their servers in Belgium (they indeed do, in Brussels) but
a) the instant you email someone in a country with tight surveillance the part you are writing and your friend is receiving, is being "data mined" too on the receiver's end
b) in Belgium a certain surveillance also goes on, although granted, less strict than in many other countries. We require email traffic to be logged but not the actual content of the email. We also have laws making it obligatory for mobile Phone providers to keep logs of whom called whom and the date and time of those calls.

I still think surveillance here is, despite the protests against the new law, a lot less intrusive than in many other nations and that Belgium still does quite well in respecting the private ongoings of their citizens. But a place without surveillance? Impossible, unless maybe you are in an unrecognised state or a Lawless country (but then would you really trust some email account hosted in such places?)

In any way, mail.be is bound to Belgian law which is now expanding surveillance level (but as said, it's still relatively little surveillance compared with many other countries)

[DrStrabismus]

Originally Posted by Tsunami

As for mail.be ... I am Belgian. This week a new law was approved making it obligatory for ISPs to keep a track record of who emails to whom, which program or client was used or which operating system, and at what date and time. The content of the email does not have to be stored or monitored, only when the email was sent, from where and to whom.

Just like phone calls.

Nevertheless Belgians speak about the worst violation against privacy in our recent history.

Given that Nazi occupation is well within living memory that's quite a strong statement.

[robert@fm]

(At time of original post, the caret below pointed to a spam that has since been deleted. And yes, I was indeed one of the many who reported it.)

^Is there any message board that is not targeted by spammers? Honestly, as soon as I saw the user name I knew what his game was.

(On another board I frequent, spammers always join/post in the middle of the UK night, and have user names which look like their cat walked across the keyboard, such as jknajcmai3908.)

[FredOnline]

Hope that you reported this as spam, as have I.

Although I do not favor the spammer with any direct response.

Normally . . .

[ReuvenNY]

The spam was removed and the spammer was banned.

[Tsunami]

Originally Posted by DrStrabismus

Given that Nazi occupation is well within living memory that's quite a strong statement.

I also think the statement was over the top, but it was made in the media. I just quoted it. However, I don't agree with it.

OK, so we from now on will see our ISP keeping logs of whom we email to, the subject line, and the date and time. But they still don't have to keep copies of the actual email. So compared to some other jurisdictions, I think us Belgians shouldn't complain too much.

As for Phone calls: numbers calling, numbers called, and date/time of the call, have to be logged. But again, actual conversation doesn't have to be stored.

Logs have to be kept for at least 1 year by law.

I don't think this is really violating our privacy as long as the email field where the actual message is, is not copied and logged. To only see logs of whom emailed whom doesn't say that much, and is by far less intrusive than the surveillance going on in many other nations.

But keep in mind, we're Belgians, we love complaining

[drew]

Here is more info from The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...am-online-data

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'

• XKeyscore gives 'widest-reaching' collection of online data
• NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches
• Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history

Do we know how they dealt with encryptation?
Would they send some trojan down to collect
the unencrypted version? Does encryption delete
the un-encrypted original email in the Email client
or is that one saved as original? I know too little
but one wonder what else we don't know what they could do?

[davy51]

The first thing to always remember when your computer is connected online

1) Everything that is put on the net through the internet can be found

That includes Surfing as well as your private emails

Once it leaves your computer it is out there for those that want to find it

Isp nor email service doesn't have much control once it leaves their servers

[drew]

Here is more. Found it by accident when I visited a friends FaceBook account he linked to it.

Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords

Secret demands mark escalation in Internet surveillance by the federal government through gaining access to user passwords, which are typically stored in encrypted form.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...unt-passwords/

How often do they get away with this?

[Bamb0]

I hope the ISPs will deny this and fight it all the way!!

[David]

Originally Posted by Bamb0

I hope the ISPs will deny this and fight it all the way!!

It's not likely that they will (though they may pretend a token resistance) - it's best to just not expect any level of privacy when using email.