July 24, 2000 - Is the Electronic Surveillance Constitutional, is on the Floor of the House Judiciary Electronic Surveillance Subcommittee on the Constitution. I watched a meeting in which they had invited the people involved with Connivor. The Committee is to gather information about the program and how it is being administered and some interesting facts were revealed.
It stunned the Committee to say the least. Connivor (I don't know if I'm spelling it correctly), is the latest scanning device beyond Echelon. The name is new and not in the dictionary but guess what, it is related to the word "conniving" [to pretend ignorance or to fail to take action against something you ought to take action against, to be indulgent, in secret sympathy; to cooperate secretly, have a secret understanding, to conspire ]. Connivance is to have knowledge of and active or passive consent of wrongdoing. Does that ever ring bells where China is concerned. Anyway, to make long story short I took a few notes. The notes of the whole meeting will be available shortly in the White House Library using the Thomas search engine [ http://thomas.loc.gov/ ] and asking for the hearing. Every word said can seen there.
I just made a few notes. Men of the agency using this program revealed that they do not have to have consent of the owner of the scanned emails. Different rules apply which do not line up with the Constitution. They aggressively filter Internet's traffic and want to install "Connivor" on every Internet Service Provider [ISP] which will be mandatory by September of 2001. The program is under constant review and will become more sophisticated as they move along. The ISP will be completely out of control and they are very worried about being hacked into because of this third party [any third party ] intrusion. They will be required to comply to provide any information by Court Order. They do not have to tell any user they are being surveiled and are required at this point to install Connivor on their servers. Users have no recourse nor representation at this point. It will remain to be seen what the Subcommittee will come up with. They complained that they have no time for this this year and that their recommendations would be presented under the new administration.
The FBI will be able to see every email. It seems to be relative to emails so far . The ISP present said that Connivor would cause major bottlenecks when intercepting and slow down their systems. In many cases Connivor is incompatable with the servers and causes systems to crash. The Committee said that there should at least be a notice to the User after they have been surveiled.
It was related by the audience that they are in court already with the ISP www.earthlink.net and did not go into details. There was a case where they asked a provider to cooperate without Connivor and the ISP complied completely. The FBI did not believe the information and by order of a magistrate made him install Connivor. When the ISP did so, his server crashed his system.
I guess there is trouble ahead for Providers and Users both. Many do not have the funds to buy the program and much less install and replace all their files if they end up with a crash.
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