U.S. Government to Access your eMail and Web Search
January 16, 2008 by Pablo Palatnik
Today, the U.S. announced it plans to draft a law to allow the government to access your email or web search. UMMMM…Privacy anyone? Listen, we know, its to protect America from terrorist and that’s great…but how far can it go before peoples civil rights are violated…especially in the web space where things are so easy to manipulate.
As an online marketer, one thing I have learned and as all of you online marketers know, people are very concerned with privacy rights and the way information is being transferred online.
Raw Story reports on this news and has the following statements and quotes:
“Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search,” author Lawrence Wright pens.
“Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said,” Wright adds. “Giorgio warned me, ‘we have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”
This actually puts Google in an odd place I think, what are they going to do? Deny government access? No.
The real deal is that they can watch as much as they want but the activity online, searches in Google, Yahoo and other engines is of such magnitude that it will almost be impossible to watch everything and take up a lot of intelligence resources.
This is just announced so it should play out MAYBE in late 2008 and maybe 2009, that’s my opinion anyway.
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Comments (2)
WhoWhere? has directories for e-mail, phone numbers, and personal Web pages.
I think a lot of what this program wants to do is track user activity…it should only be done when someone is under suspicion.