I'm having a hard time believing this is OK:
San Francisco - Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web page IPs the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.
In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of pen registers in 1979, saying callers have no right to conceal from the government the numbers they communicate electronically to the phone companies that carry their calls.
Except that the Web IPs that are sent back and forth are often static, or remain up for some time before expiring (as in the case of dynamicly generated content). This is more akin to allowing the reading and listening-in the judges think they are avoiding by allowing the monitoring of "web address IPs".
Do we really want Big Brother to be institutionalized? Forget a dossier - what about a list of evey web address IP your computer accesses made available to any federal group that wants to bother...
From the opinion:
Alba challenges the validity of computer surveillance that enabled the government to learn the to/from addresses of his e mail messages, the Internet protocol (“IP”) addresses of the websites that he visited and the total volume of information transmitted to or from his account. We conclude that this surveillance was analogous to the use of a pen register that the Supreme Court held in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), did not constitute a search for Fourth Amendment purposes. Moreover, whether or not the surveillance came within the scope of the then-applicable federal pen register statute, Alba is not entitled to the suppression of the evidence obtained through the surveillance because there is no statutory or other authority for such a remedy. 18074 UNITED STATES v. FORRESTER
Will this get overturned? Will a 5-4 SCOTUS install a telescreen in your home?
Tell me I'm not paranoid. [Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.]
I'm off to the farmers' market where presumably my produce is not bugged (ha).
[Note: My initial reading of the news article included the idea that URLs were covered, and that appears to not be the case, as the court notes in the opinion footnote:
6 Surveillance techniques that enable the government to determine not
only the IP addresses that a person accesses but also the uniform resource
locators (“URL”) of the pages visited might be more constitutionally prob-
lematic. A URL, unlike an IP address, identifies the particular document
within a website that a person views and thus reveals much more informa-
tion about the person’s Internet activity.
However, it is still an open question if this information itself is too personal so as to require a warrant. I have repalced 'URL' with 'Web address IP' where corrected above.]