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I was surprised to receive an invitation from a colleague to join the quechup.com network so we can continue our [non-existent] friendship there. I figured G had sent out a notice to everyone in her address book without first removing the people she doesn’t really want to “be friends” with. I only got part of this right.

Every one in G’s address book did get an quechup.com invite, but those invites weren’t sent by G. I’ve been following up on this story since then.

Quechup will ask for your email account ID and password when you sign up to their social network, and then send out invitations to your contacts in your name. Doing so, apparently, whether you remain a member of their service or not. The word on the net is stay away from quechup. According to Boingboing “Quechup is rotten: don’t accept invites”.

If you have signed up to quechup, ticked agree to their TOS and given them your email account password, immediately changing your password may block them from sending an invitation in your name to every one of your address book entries. This is worth a try, but be forewarned that it may be too late already to stop this from happening.

In future, any time you are prompted to give any individual or company open access to your address book’s contacts, your personal antennae should turn bright red and jab you in the head to remind you, “Uh uh. Don’t go there.”

For now, you might want to cancel your membership with Quechup on line. And, also write to Quechup’s parent company instructing them to be sure and remove your name from their active membership roster. It seems that Quechup continues to show members on their website as active even after they’ve cancelled their membership.

Howard Rheingold posted Quechup’s corporate information through Twitter:

Quechup attorney, I am told: Loeb & Loeb LLP 345 Park Avenue New York, NY 10154-0037 Tel: (212) 407-4000Tel: (212) 407-4000 USA

Quechup parent corp, I’m told: iDate Corporation 6767 West Tropicana Ave. Suite 207, Las Vegas, NV 89103 Las Vegas, NV 89103

The REAL ID provision was built into a must-pass appropriations bill in 2005 to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now a provision to make REAL ID permanent has been hidden in an immigration bill making its way through congress.

It is estimated that a national ID program will cost individual Americans 8 billion dollars and state governments as much as 14 billion more. Sixteen states have already voted against supporting a national ID program. Help stop REAL ID from robbing Americans of our freedom and privacy!

The Baucus-Tester and Grassley-Baucus amendments to the immigration bill strip out the REAL ID provisions. Contact your representatives and ask them to please support these amendments.

I just learned that the CIA has a venture capital branch. And guess what? One of the guys who runs it helped start Facebook. I particularly loved learning this little tidbit of information: when you become a Facebook member you authorize Facebook to gather information about you from Facebook and “other sources” and to share this information with “responsible corporations” Facebook has a relationship with.

What do you think about this practice? I think it’s intrusive and immoral. Leave your comment, let me know.

To learn more, watch the flash presentation or read an article with an extensive bibliography.

Mark Graber [Professor, U Maryland School of Law]
posts on Balkinization

Princeton University Professor Walter F. Murphy, “the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel,” discovered last month at an airport that he’s been placed on a terrorist watch list. One security aide asked, “”Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. “That’ll do it,” the man said.” Jump to article.

Article published in the Washington Post 2007 03 23

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made . . . The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author’s attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

The Justice Department’s inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue “national security letters.” It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision — demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval — to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn’t been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law . . . Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time . . .

The Facts
Steven Warshak is an apparent no-good guy. He publicly sells “natural male enhancement” products of questionable value via TV commercials and he’s being prosecuted for it. But Warshak does seem to have the right idea about how important the issue of privacy is to US citizens.

John Reinan of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune lays out the principle issues of Warshak’s lawsuit. Warshak claims that a “search of his e-mail violated,” his 4th Amendment rights to be protected, “against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Was the government right to examine Steven Warshak’s private emails without a search warrant? Although prosecutors are appealing that decision, one US district judge has already ruled in Warshak’s favor.

Email privacy is an enormous issue. The EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] cautions that companies offering both internet search and email storage collect a massive amount of personal information about users. Yahoo, MSN, Google and Amazon save information about you based on the searches you make on their sites. Other personal details about you comes from scanning your private emails.

A New York Times article offers this quote from the owner of a Massachussetts PR firm. ”Privacy is critical to me. We’re losing more and more of it slowly — daily, monthly, annually. Pretty soon we’ll be so accustomed to having our privacy invaded, it will no longer feel like invasion and we’ll get used to a new way of living without privacy altogether. I’m not sure I want that. ”

Google Watch reports that Google scans the contents of all of its users emails and reserves the right to “give this information to whomever they wish.” They also caution that, “email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act,” after only 6 months!, at which time they become the public property. And that Google discards none of your emails – not even the ones that you trash. In other words, all of your gmail ends up as publicly accessible information which may be stored indefinitely without your knowledge or consent, on Google’s internal servers.

My opinion
I don’t love criminal activity, but I also believe that the privacy rights of the great, law-abiding public merits absolute protection. It obviously would be quite easy for law officials to build cases for prosecution if they could stroll into any person’s life, log into anyone’s personal email account, and spend as much time as they wished to spend, figuring out how to use findings as evidence for prosecuting that person for criminal activity. If nothing prosecutable were found, on to the next potential candidate. This would be an easy way for law enforcers to prosecute US citizens. But, it happens that in the US, the private lives of citizens are not supposed to be opened up to inspection by people looking to call judgment down upon us, curtail our freedom of movement or speech, or inhibit our happiness.

How to Protect Yourself
Here’s a checklist in simple language of the steps to take to protect yourself against your email-plus-search provider stockpiling a big fat database file on you with intimate details about each one of your lifestyle and shopping preferences. Take steps to limit your exposure before your private life is offered for sale to the highest bidder.

More Reading
More on the subject of Google’s email privacy policy at EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center.