How does that translate, though, to you and me? The excerpts came from the Village Voice, not exactly your traditional mag.
Entitled "Who Opened Their E-mail? It's the Kiddie Porn Crusaders," it was written by Annette Fuentes:
"Don't look now, but some FBI suits may be lurking around the chat room or, worse, secretly surveilling your e-mail and other private cyberspace communications. And chances are it's all in the name of fighting child pornography.
That's what two New York City women learned recently when each received certified mail from the U.S. Justice Department. The letters, dated May 20, explained that ''between the dates of August 1, 1995 and August 26, 1995, electronic communications involving you or persons using your America Online username were intercepted.''
The letters listed several other account numbers and their respective screen names suggestive of pornography, none of which had any connection to the women.
''I was horrified,'' said one of the victims, a professor at SUNY Old Westbury. ''At first I didn't understand what it was all about. I didn't recognize any of the screen names.''
She called the assistant U.S. attorney who had signed the letter, John David Kuchta, in Virginia. He told her the rationale for the surveillance was child porn.
She told him, in turn, that she felt her privacy and civil rights had been violated, whereupon he said to her:
"Don't worry, you were just caught up in the net. You didn't do anything criminal, and you should support what we're doing."
A friend of hers was treated likewise. This lady, an educator in the Queens library system, according to this Village Voice essay,
". . . was stunned to learn that almost a year after the fact, the FBI was disclosing that they'd been spying on (my) travels through cyberspace.
'I don't expect total privacy online the same way I know the telephone isn't really private,'' she said. ''But how often will the government raise the specter of child porn to justify this?''
This lady e-mailed AOL, explaining her outrage. By return mail came a form letter from Jean Villanueva, a vice president for corporate communications, stating that AOL had merely complied with a court order obtained by the Justice Department when it ''monitored'' the e-mail of six AOL subscribers.
It was part of Justice's campaign, ''Innocent Images,'' Villanueva explained.
He referred her to a special Justice Department hotline set up to deal with AOL subscribers like the two ladies above, innocents caught in the web.
One of them called the hotline, left a message, and two weeks later got a call back from a lady, Tonya Fox, who told her there were some 840 other AOL subscribers like her who had "accidentally" stumbled into the FBI's cyber wiretaps. If she wanted to read her file on her own surveillance, she should get herself a lawyer.
Reports the Village Voice:
"How (these two ladies) were scooped up by the FBI they can't figure out. If one of them tripped into FBI surveillance of a suspected pornographer, did she then lead the feds to her friend through their e-mail correspondence?
ACLU associate director Barry Steinhardt says that while it's legal for the government armed with a warrant to surveil the e-mail and other private cyber communications of suspected criminals, it is not legal to extend the surveillance to unrelated communications of innocent bystanders who chance into chat rooms or read electronic bulletin boards while a suspect is also present.
''What has happened here is the most intrusive form of e-mail interception,'' Steinhardt said. ''The government can get a subpoena to intercept real-time e-mail, which is the equivalent of phone wiretapping. They can also use a variety of devices to retrieve stored e-mail.''
But, adds Steinhardt, what is legal and what should be lawful are two different things."
Ê Justin Williams, chief of the Justice Department's criminal division in Alexandria, Virginia, could not comment on the particular investigation that snared these two women. Creatively he insisted, however, that what happened to them ''was not a surveillance.''
''You wouldn't say their e-mail was read,'' Williams said. ''It could be they were surfing the Internet and happened into a particular room where by chance there is an [individual] under electronic surveillance.''
Williams said their hotline received 160 calls from AOL subscribers similarly surveyed. While the statute regulating government surveillance Title III requires Justice to notify the targets of eavesdropping, notifying innocent bystanders is discretionary, he said.
Williams could not say how many such online surveillances the Justice Department is conducting. But ACLU lawyer Steinhardt says in the past year, the government's pursuit of child porn in cyberspace has reached a fever pitch.
Welcome to the New World Order! No wonder the Fundamentalists talk of the computer as THE BEAST.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"You'll furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war."
(William Randolph Hearst)
Comments? E-Mail: irimland@cts.com