E-Mail Snooping Ruled Permissible

Eric Brunner-Williams brunner at nic-naa.net
Thu Jul 1 11:28:30 UTC 2004


Hey Bill,

> Switches, routers, and any intermediate computers are fair game for 
> warrantless wiretaps.

I looked at that and thought about the one-bit-delay in a ring, and
started playing with fragments and error correction and reassembly and
buffer size in the intermediate network element(s) and ...
Not the sort of thing you'd want to hang whether or not a data stream
was subject to the Act or not.

Thanks for pointing out the scope of the dissenting opinion, that with
the Act confined to no-temporary-store communications paths, goverment
would be free to conduct taps w/o warrant, not just Councilman.

Someone should tell the rocket scientists that work for Tommy Ridge that
liability for duplication of classified data may be dependent on the RAM
present in each intermediate node, and that if the amount of RAM is not
sufficient to support buffer copy operations, the government will be more
likely to successfully prosecute terrorist keyboarders. It is possible
that the DHS network has way too much RAM to be safe.

Eric






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