One of the pieces of legislation being reviewed to deal with terrorism would permit Internet surveillance without a court order. The scope of that surveillance was debated at a Congressional committee meeting on Tuesday. The bill’s advocates argue that prosecutors should be able to intercept e-mail headers (TO: and FROM:), since it’s analogous to what they can discover about incoming and outgoing phone calls. But they’re also requesting the right to intercept the addresses of all web sites visited, without a court order. And that’s a wildly different thing, eh? Wired Magazine quotes Senators Hatch and Schumer as saying that “Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the identities of their e-mail correspondents, or the addresses of Web pages they visit.” Boy, that sounds flatly wrong to me.
