On Feb 27, 2014, at 9:55 AM, S Moonesamy <[email protected]> wrote:

>  "The end user will usually be at the losing end of the bargain in
>   a tussle between the end user and government when Internet traffic
>   wiretapping is a matter of national security."

That depends on context. In a technology context, I imagine you're correct; in 
America we say "you can't fight city hall." In the context of citizenship, it 
is exactly the role of a citizen to use the processes of "city hall" to engage 
and perhaps win.

On February 11, I sent emails to each of my senators and my representative. 
This is Fred the Citizen doing the Citizen thing. The content of that email was:

> Two weeks ago, I visited the FCC, staff for the House Committee on Energy and 
> Commerce, majority and minority, and senate staff regarding Net Neutrality. 
> In my opinion, many of the problems we now experience have to do with the 
> baroque structure of the Communications Act, OCCSS, FISA, ECPA, CALEA, and 
> Patriot. They were probably appropriate for the telecom era. However, the 
> changes due to the Internet and the eventual shutdown of the PSTN are forcing 
> a new regulatory regime, one decision or lawsuit at a time. 
> 
> In my opinion, Congress would do us all a favor if they scrapped the current 
> regulatory structure and designed a structure appropriate to an open Internet.
> 
> Today, you will be hearing a lot about the NSA and the surveillance state. In 
> my opinion, law enforcement should be authorized to intercept whatever they 
> need to, whether metadata or content; the current structure authorizes some 
> things and not others, with no evident foresight or plan. However, law 
> enforcement should only be authorized to do so when they have been given a 
> warrant identifying the surveillance subject and the data expected to be 
> intercepted. Any concept of mass collection of either metadata or 
> communication content is, to my thinking, an unreasonable search and seizure.
> 
> In the words of G.K.Chesterton, "We are learning to do a great many clever 
> things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them." In the era of 
> the Internet, his observation is especially meaningful.

I got two responses. My representative sent me her "out of office" response, 
and one of my senators sent a note indicating that she thinks Net Neutrality is 
an important topic. "City Hall" is listening about as well as it ever does.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

_______________________________________________
ietf-privacy mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-privacy

Reply via email to