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Tuesday, March 09, 2010Run for the hills! It's HB 150
The much-talked about HB 150 passed the Senate this morning. We've heard some valid concern about this bill, mixed with a little healthy paranoia and some outright misunderstanding.
Here are some facts: HB 150 is designed to give law enforcement a technological tool to investigate not only sex offenses against children but also child kidnapping and stalking activity. Criminals have expanded their criminal activities with technology (text messaging, emails, access to internet) and it is important to expand law enforcement's ability likewise to include electronic communication devices such as cell phones as well as being able to trace email addresses.
posted by The Senate Site at 5:45 PM | Link
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10 Comments:
Saying that the bill does not go after content first requires defining what "content" is. My contact information -- the core element in retaining a right to privacy -- is very much "content" I would like to keep away from the government, if and when I choose, and therefore being forced to surrender it (without a warrant and probable cause) is suspect.
Saying that other states have a bad law in place doesn't exactly warm the heart. It's like saying that other countries waterboard their own citizens, so why not the USA? If it's right or wrong, fine, but let it stand on its own merits, rather than justifying or defending it based on what others have done.
I maintain that the use of administrative subpoenas is a violation of the separation of powers we conservatives love to praise (except when children are involved... "think of the children!"). Any executive officer being able to obtain personal information (including the allegedly "non-content" contact information of an individual) without judicial oversight or at least some other buffer is very problematic, in my opinion.
Why do we need these laws when the Constitution already allows for information to be obtained? To me, it comes across as suggesting the Constitution is (as Bennett would say) agrarian and not applicable to today's standards. I just don't feel comfortable with it, even looking closer at the amendment.
I guess part of me just believes in a higher law, and also that there is a higher power that is looking over all of us. I don't believe a law is going to spare a child if the child has need of being spared. It is somewhat like the child restraint amendments. You can use the very rare, atypical cases to persuade people that we can "protect" or "improve." I know there's the whole baby selling incident being used as an example. The "it's for the children" examples. But when we focus too closely on these incidents, letting emotion dictate legislation, we lose sight of the whole picture, trading liberty for supposed protection. The constitutional provisions are sufficient, IMHO. I am not swayed by the idea that the federal government is doing this already (because I'm uncomfortable with that). Like my mom said, "Just because Johnny jumps off a cliff, it doesn't mean you should, too!" I guess I can still hope the Governor has the sense to veto the bill.
Republicans love to talk about caring for the constitution and then turn around and vote to tarnish its values.
Watching the state split hairs like this is more than a little annoying. This isn't the first time law enforcement has tried to make their jobs easier by scaring us as parents and it won't be the last.
As a citizen of Utah and as an Internet user I firmly believe that if law enforcement wants details on my relationship with my provider, including my name, they are welcome to bring a warrant. After all I am a private citizen working with a private business.
No warrant, no info.
The whole point of the fourth and fifth amendments is to preserve a society where people need not live in fear of the civil authorities. To lower the barriers to police acquisition of private information undermines that basic protection. Yes, it does so for criminals and law abiding citizens alike, but the fact is the HB150 is a law designed to govern an immoral society - it can never work because only societies with some level of morality being privately upheld are governable in the first place.
What I object to is the lack of accountability created by HB 150.
In committee testimony, the assistant attorney general who testified in favor told legislators there had been no problems with the existing use of administrative subpoenas.
Um, how can the public know if there's a problem when there is no recordkeeping requirement and the subpoenas are sent from the government to the service provider. The account holder may never be the wiser.
And HB 150 made the recordkeeping requirement even less transparent. Now a prosecutor won't have to reveal the number of state administrative subpoenas sought, just the number of federal administrative subpoenas sought.
With the coming election season, is it a good idea to have political operatives working out of the Utah Attorney General's Office such as Wade Farraway and Kirk Torgenson trolling through the telephone, email and internet records of their political critics? Should a state investigator be permitted access to electronic records to serve the espionage or surveillance interests of their private clients in their second job? All for the price of a Microsoft or AT&T service fee?
I think not. Utahns have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their telephone, email and internet records. HB 150 threatens the integrity of our private correspondene.
http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/usc2701.htm
I think Shurtleff totally/ intentially misrepresented this bill to Utahns in his interview on KSL with Doug Wright. Shurtleff told Wright only the name on the accounts could be accessed. Wright needs to have him back on to explain the discrepancies of what we were told and what is actually in the bill.
"As an intelligence-gathering phenomenon, an analyst with an MIT degree in algorithms would rather have 50 pages of who called who than 50 hours of actual conversation. Think about conversations with friends, husbands, wives. That raw information doesn't mean anything. But if there's a pattern of 30 phone calls over the course of a day, that can mean a lot. It's a much simpler algorithm."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ketcham.php
I object to the poor controls of this bill. There is nothing in the bill that requires that the attorney general disclose the scope of the search to the ISP. It only states that the ISP must supply the information. This means that an uninformed or improperly coerced ISP may indulge in looking into the headers of email messages when trying to track down the individual. This would likely be the case if the AG only supplied an IP address to the scope of the warrant. Most ISPs do NOT track which subscriber is on which IP at any given time. This information is however readily available in the headers of email messages especially. This includes timestamps and other such information that could be used by the AG. Because the AG places the the responsibility on the ISP to find the information and because the bill specifically states ANY information that the ISP owns or CONTROLS!*&#^&! this means that anything, including email headers is not specifically excluded by the bill. This bill is ripe for abuse!
What will it take to get Herbert to veto this bill?
The "constitutionalists" tilting at the federal government apparently didn't get past the 2nd amendment. Passing the 4th amendment violations of this bill along with the Guns and eminent domains laws is hypocritical.
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