The Volokh Conspiracy

A reader passed along the "all your computer are belong to us" story that first broke on the Glenn Beck show; here's PolitiFact's summary, with the government response:

[On his show, Beck quoted the following statement from cars.gov]: "This application provides access to the DOT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a federal computer system and it is property of the United States Government. Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized CARS, DOT, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign." ...

The Department of Transportation confirmed the language was on the cars.gov Web site, but on Aug. 3 it was removed. The DOT released this statement to PolitiFact: "A security warning on the CARS.gov dealer support page that stated computers logged into the system were considered property of the Federal Government has been removed. We are working to revise the language. The language was posted on the portion of the website accessible by car dealers and not the general public."

"It would be factually inaccurate to say that any computer that went to cars.gov would become the property of the U.S. government," said Sasha Johnson, a DOT spokeswoman said....

What a screw-up. I have no reason at this point to think that this was part of some malevolent government conspiracy, or even of a well-intentioned but ill-thought-through design. It might well have been an error by one low-level Web designer, which wasn't reviewed by any higher-up. Still, what a mistake to make, especially when people are understandably concerned that the federal government in general likes to poke around on your computer systems. (I approve of some degree of such poking around, in some cases, but the existence of federal computer surveillance and the growth of such surveillance makes erroneous claims of such surveillance especially plausible and frightening to people.)

PolitiFact goes on to point out that the Glenn Beck item was mistaken in suggesting that the warning purported to apply to consumers — it only applies to dealers that access that part of the site. I think in the course of this, PolitiFact underestimates the propriety of the criticism (referring to "the small amount of truth in their comments [on the Beck program]") and exaggerates the error. But that's tangential to the point I'm making here, which is about the Department of Transportation error and not about the Beck program's errors.

Thanks to Angela Thornton Canny for e-mailing me to alert me to the controversy.

UPDATE: Someone whom I know and trust on such matters e-mails me the following speculation:

Most U.S. government computers have a "banner" that greets a government user that says the computer belongs to the U.S. government and that any and all communications can be logged. The purpose of the banner is to give notice of monitoring that generates consent to monitoring under the Wiretap Act.

I would guess that someone who didn't understand the law thought that they needed to have a similar banner for the use of cars.gov, so they just took the standard banner and replaced the phrase "this computer is the property of the U.S." with the phrase, "When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered the property of the U.S. government."

The trick is that who owns the computer is actually irrelevant to the monitoring, and no such notice of the monitoring is required when the government's computer is the recipient of the communication and not the originator. So it was probably just a screwup thanks to someone who didn't understand the legal purpose of the "banner" notice widely used on government machines.

(Just to make clear, the monitoring that my correspondent says would be generally authorized would be the monitoring of material from the government computer side — not the reading of material on any private computer that's communicating with the government computer.) Sure enough, my search revealed similar language on a Los Alamos National Laboratory site, as well as several other sites:

This is a Federal computer system and is the property of the United States Government. It is for authorized use only. Users (authorized or unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy.

Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized site, Department of Energy, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign. By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion of authorized site or Department of Energy personnel.

	[Eugene Volokh, August 4, 2009 at 3:03pm] Trackbacks Huh? A reader passed along the "all your computer are belong to us" story that first broke on the Glenn Beck show; here's PolitiFact's summary, with the government response: [On his show, Beck quoted the following statement from cars.gov]: "This application provides access to the DOT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a federal computer system and it is property of the United States Government. Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized CARS, DOT, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign." ... The Department of Transportation confirmed the language was on the cars.gov Web site, but on Aug. 3 it was removed. The DOT released this statement to PolitiFact: "A security warning on the CARS.gov dealer support page that stated computers logged into the system were considered property of the Federal Government has been removed. We are working to revise the language. The language was posted on the portion of the website accessible by car dealers and not the general public." "It would be factually inaccurate to say that any computer that went to cars.gov would become the property of the U.S. government," said Sasha Johnson, a DOT spokeswoman said.... What a screw-up. I have no reason at this point to think that this was part of some malevolent government conspiracy, or even of a well-intentioned but ill-thought-through design. It might well have been an error by one low-level Web designer, which wasn't reviewed by any higher-up. Still, what a mistake to make, especially when people are understandably concerned that the federal government in general likes to poke around on your computer systems. (I approve of some degree of such poking around, in some cases, but the existence of federal computer surveillance and the growth of such surveillance makes erroneous claims of such surveillance especially plausible and frightening to people.) PolitiFact goes on to point out that the Glenn Beck item was mistaken in suggesting that the warning purported to apply to consumers — it only applies to dealers that access that part of the site. I think in the course of this, PolitiFact underestimates the propriety of the criticism (referring to "the small amount of truth in their comments [on the Beck program]") and exaggerates the error. But that's tangential to the point I'm making here, which is about the Department of Transportation error and not about the Beck program's errors. Thanks to Angela Thornton Canny for e-mailing me to alert me to the controversy. UPDATE: Someone whom I know and trust on such matters e-mails me the following speculation: Most U.S. government computers have a "banner" that greets a government user that says the computer belongs to the U.S. government and that any and all communications can be logged. The purpose of the banner is to give notice of monitoring that generates consent to monitoring under the Wiretap Act. I would guess that someone who didn't understand the law thought that they needed to have a similar banner for the use of cars.gov, so they just took the standard banner and replaced the phrase "this computer is the property of the U.S." with the phrase, "When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered the property of the U.S. government." The trick is that who owns the computer is actually irrelevant to the monitoring, and no such notice of the monitoring is required when the government's computer is the recipient of the communication and not the originator. So it was probably just a screwup thanks to someone who didn't understand the legal purpose of the "banner" notice widely used on government machines. (Just to make clear, the monitoring that my correspondent says would be generally authorized would be the monitoring of material from the government computer side — not the reading of material on any private computer that's communicating with the government computer.) Sure enough, my search revealed similar language on a Los Alamos National Laboratory site, as well as several other sites: This is a Federal computer system and is the property of the United States Government. It is for authorized use only. Users (authorized or unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy. Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized site, Department of Energy, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign. By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion of authorized site or Department of Energy personnel.