Hidden Services, Current Events, and Freedom Hosting

It's hard to know where to start.

You don't have any 4th Amendment protections for international communications. You need to go back to ... hmm ... high school? Grade school? Learn what "sovereignty" means! You may live in a country that affords you certain civil rights, including the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant. Several important points:

1. These rights that your country might afford you end at the country's border. Outside of that border, you are no longer in that country. You are outside of its area of sovereignty. Depending on where you are, you are subject either to the sovereignty of another country, which is unlikely to afford you the same rights, or you are floating on the ocean and only subject to whatever rights international law gives you. Even your own country does not have to afford you the same rights outside of its borders.

2. Even within your country, there are limits to the rights that you might have. In the U.S., for example, your 4th Amendment rights require the government to get a warrant based upon probable cause to enter your home and seize your "papers and effects." Your rights outside of your home - for example, traveling on an Interstate highway, or using a public communications network (paid for by the taxpayers - in the case of the Internet, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the major research universities (funded with federal tax money), and, oh yeah, Al Gore), are much more limited if they exist at all. If you want privacy for your electronic communications, pay AT&T to set up a totally private network on private property for you to use, and the chances that you will get your privacy improve dramatically.

3. Even assuming that government violates your 4th Amendment rights in the U.S., as a practical matter, the only legal remedy available to you is to prevent the government from using the information obtained without a warrant against you in a criminal proceeding. No criminal prosecution? No harm, no foul. They can collect all of the information they want. [One of the reasons I don't get too excited about NSA is that the revelations involving DEA using the same software (see discussion, below) to collect information on citizens without warrants, and then covering up the illegal collection of evidence and using it in criminal trials, a legal violation that is much more serious.]

4. Your 4th Amendment only applies to the government of the U.S. Now, think about it: If you were the head of sigint (signals intelligence) or elinit (electronic intelligence) at GCHQ in the U.K., F.S.B in Russia, Mossad in Israel, etc., where is the first place you would put a covert agent? Hmm. My guess is you'd put a covert software engineer at MSFT and every other major software company. Why do you think there are so many updates to fix security vulnerabilities? You'd think they'd have found them all by now! No. N.S.A. puts one in, Mossad finds it, takes it out, puts theirs in, F.S.B. finds it, takes it out, puts theirs in, GCHQ finds it, takes it out, puts theirs in, and on and on. And, your computer reboots every night with yet another update fixing yet another problem. The point here is that even if N.S.A, C.I.A., F.B.I. legally are prohibited from invading your privacy, the foreign intelligence services are not. When you hear on the news that, "The threat risk has been increased based upon credible intelligence received by U.S. intelligence officials." what is usually being said (if the threat involves something in the U.S.) is, "Some foreign intelligence service monitoring communications inside the U.S. that our agencies could not legally monitor tipped us off." Look at Snowden's grant of conditional asylum in Russia. He can only stay so long as he does not "reveal any additional information harmful to our American friends." Why did Putin include that? What could Snowden possibly reveal? Maybe that F.S.B. cooperates with the U.S. to a much greater degree than we are aware? You think we have a problem with Islamic terrorism?. When you get back to school, look at a stinking map! Russia has Islamic republics all along its borders. Everything that you have heard of N.S.A. collecting - and more - is available to every major intelligence service in the world.

5. The only legal issues here - and they are extremely serious - are the use of "general warrants" by the U.S. intelligence community (I.C.) before the F.I.S.A. court, and the blatantly illegal conduct of D.E.A, which nobody seems to care about.

6. You want it to be technically impossible "to seize your papers and consequences" for trying? In your dreams! First, the U.S. I.C. has a company, In-Q-Tel, Inc., in Reston Va. that provides venture capital to entrepreneurs developing (among other things) software of value to intelligence gathering. In-Q-Tel is NOT the only venture capital company in this business. (You didn't think PRISM, XKEYHOLE, etc. were written by entry-level government employees, did you?) There are companies spending hundreds of millions, even billions, developing these technologies. It is never going to be "technically impossible" to conduct surveillance. As for imposing consequence on those who try to do so, you might find that locating all of the "sleeper agents" sent here by K.G.B. - predecessor to F.S.B. - is not going to be easy. F.B.I. counterintelligence is working on it, and they caught about 10 of them a couple years ago, but many remain. The "consequences" for these folks is prosecution for espionage and imprisonment, until of course Russia grabs a few U.S. tourists, charges them as spies, and we have to arrange a swap. As for the Mossad, these are not nice people. They make your average U.S. criminal sociopath look like an alter boy. Israel believes it is always at war and, therefore, is not subject to restraints on murder, kidnapping or other conduct that virtually all other countries, even those hostile to us, deem beyond the bounds of civilized conduct. Any attempt to impose "consequences" on them is likely to backfire.

7. I know you are going to find this hard to believe, but entrepreneurs who rely on venture capital companies for funding tend to be single-minded. They only want to sell their products whenever it is legal to do so to anyone with the money to buy them. They just want to become profitable as soon as possible, so that they can buy out the venture capitalists (often referred to as "vulture" capitalists). They are not terribly discerning about whom they sell to. So, not only is every governmental intelligence agency with funding - probably including North Korea - gathering the same information as the N.S.A., but private companies, lots of them, are customers of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all those social sites you love so much. Ancestry.com scares the hell out of me! If they can trace the addresses of my great grandparents, what can they report about me? These social networking sites are not funded by the government like National Public Radio, and they are not charities. You're not paying them, so how are they making money? By selling every word you write to private companies that prepare personality profiles on you. They have access to and use the same software as N.S.A. and all the intelligence agencies. You can find your teenager's car by geolocating his/her cell phone in real time if you have the money. So can pedophiles, other low-lifes, schools, employers, and anybody else nosy enough to want to know. No, the 4th Amendment does not apply to private conduct.

8. You think universal "wireless" connectivity is the way to go, huh? A basic legal principle - codified in the Communications Act of 1934 - is that "the airwaves belong to the people." And, those "people" include the government, that government famously, "of the people, by the people and for the people." This means that anything you put out on the airwaves belonging to the people is the property of the people. I have radio frequency scanners, and I can listen to police, fire, F.B.I., C.I.A., air traffic control, virtually anything. The frequencies they use are published in public documents. They sometimes try to use trunked systems or encryption, but if I can track it or decrypt it, I can listen to it. [Yes, there are statutes that prohibit listening to cell phone traffic or selling scanners with that capability. But, those scanners can be purchased in Canada, and the Constitutionality of those statutes is questionable.] Fedora ships Linux with utilities that crack WiFi. Why would you promote wireless? Anybody, including the government, who can hack it is free to do so on the people's airwaves! And, you wouldn't want it any other way. If they can stop you from listening to police, fire, F.B.I., C.I.A., air traffic control or your neighbor's WiFi, it is only a very short step to stop you from watching BBC or receiving TV or radio broadcasts government deems "dangerous" or of value to "terrorists."

Stop dreaming. Learn something. Get a life.
Gnovalis

[Yes, by education and historical avocation I am a lawyer. And, I studied constitutional law under Arthur Kinoy, one of the nation's most brilliant constitutional scholars and a founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. I've practiced at world class law firms, served two NYSE companies as a senior legal executive, and been an international entrepreneur.]