Day: July 11, 2000

The FBI’s Carnivorous Appetite

    At the same time that politicians have been complaining that e-commerce companies aren’t doing enough to respect the privacy of Internet users, along comes the revelation that the FBI has developed an electronic surveillance system called Carnivore which lets it monitor millions of e-mails.

    The system is as simple as it is insidious. First, the FBI obtains a court order to monitor the email of a particular person. These have become trivially easy to get thanks to the Clinton administration. Second, the FBI goes to the Internet Service Provider that the person uses and attaches its Carnivore system. Basically the Carnivore system intercepts every single e-mail message that is coming in through that system and is supposed to then filter out and capture only the e-mail from the person covered under the court order.

    But as former federal computer-crimes prosecutor Mark Rasch told the Wall Street Journal, this is “the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody’s phone calls to see if it’s the phone call you should be monitoring. You develop a tremendous amount of information.”

    The real problem being, of course, that there is no check on the system once it’s in place and based on its history only a fool would trust the FBI as far as you can throw Louis Freeh. Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia), who has led the fight against other government monitoring systems such as Echelon, summed up the problem with Carnivore: “Once the software is applied to the ISP, there’s no check on the system. If there’s one word I would use to describe this, it would be ‘frightening.'”

    The Wall Street Journal tracked down an FBI flak, Marcus Thomas, to whine that “This is just a very specialized sniffer” and to point out that there are criminal and civil penalties that prohibit the FBI from conducting unauthorized wiretap and that evidence gleaned from such a wiretap would be inadmissible in court. Apparently Thomas thinks that Americans are stupid with a capital “S.”

    Sure the evidence is inadmissible in court, but that doesn’t prevent the FBI from developing criminal cases based on information they find in an unauthorized wiretap and simply forgetting to mention the origin of the original information. Besides, the FBI has in the past managed to put inadmissible evidence to very good use. Much of the information that the FBI collected on civil rights groups was clearly inadmissible in court, but agents still used it to try to destroy people’s reputations and lives.

    Fortunately, the FBI hasn’t yet succeeded in banning strong cryptography so anyone who wants to communicate securely over the Internet can still do so by using a program such as Pretty Good Privacy.

    Users concerned about eavesdropping by the Feds should treat the FBI as network damage and route around it.

Sources:

‘Carnivore’ Eats Your Privacy. Wired News, July 11, 2000.

FBI’s system to covertly search e-mail raises privacy, legal issues. The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2000.

OTC the Pill Already

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering reclassifying a number of prescription drugs and turning them into drugs that would be available over the counter. Among the drugs under consideration for OTC status is the birth control pill. Such a move is long over due.

There is already some precedent for making this move. In some states pills that induce abortion can already be dispensed by pharmacists which makes them effectively over the counter drugs. Why not make the Pill, which hundreds of millions of women have safely taken, available without a prescription as well? Why shouldn’t a woman be able to walk into a drug store and buy birth control pills without going to see a doctor first?

The main argument against making the Pill available over-the-counter are the tired old paternalist arguments about protecting patients from themselves. Although the Pill is a relatively safe drug, a small percentage of women will have side effects and need to consult a physician to find the best drug for them. But this problem is no more egregious than the side effects that other OTC drugs have — after all aspirin is a potential killer when taken by certain people, yet it’s been available over-the-counter literally since it was first widely available.

It’s very important to have the convenience of popping down to a drug store for an aspirin or ibuprofen pain killer, and the same sort of freedom and convenience should be extended to birth control drugs.

Ironically while only one major anti-abortion group, the American Life League, has weighed in decrying the move to make birth control easily available without a prescription, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights League and Planned Parenthood are both oddly ambivalent about the whole issue. Salon quotes NARAL attorney Elizabeth Arndorfer as saying, “Using emergency contraception is a one-time thing that many recent studies have shown to be effective. But there are contraindications for some women using the birth control pill longer term. It may be better for a doctor to keep an eye it.”

So women are intelligent and capable of making the choice for themselves whether or not to have an abortion, but they are too irresponsible to seek out information on the birth control pill and decide for themselves whether or not to take it.

Women are not simply moral patients, they are moral actors. Women are more than capable of deciding for themselves whether or not to take a drug such as the Pill. The FDA should approve the Pill for over the counter sales as soon as possible.

Sources:

The silence of the Pill. Leah Kohlenberg, Salon.Com, July 10, 2000.

No prescription for the pill?. CNN, June 29, 2000.

Taleban Bans Women Aid Workers

According to the BBC the Taleban, the group of Islamic fundamentalists in power in Afghanistan, recently arrested an American aid worker and ordered the United Nations and other aid agencies to fire any Afghanistan women working with the agencies. The BBC estimated there are several hundred such women working for aid agencies.

Mary MacMakin, the American woman arrested by the Taleban, is in her seventies and has worked on aid projects in Afghanistan on and off for 40 years. MacMakin was arrested with her staff and nine male aid workers. The men were released earlier, but MacMakin is still being detained. MacMakin was working on a project teaching widows in Kabul to make carpets and other projects.

The Afghanistan regime has become infamous around the world for its strict sex laws, including a ban on women working outside the home. That ban had been moderated somewhat in recent months when the Taleban exempted women working in certain sectors such as health care, but the arrest of MacMakin and the ban on female aid workers suggests a turn back toward the group’s ultra conservative policies.

Source:

Taleban move against women workers. The BBC, July 10, 2000.