Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So the real question (whether NSLs should be allowed) is quite a bit more nuanced.
I don't think they should, but not really on the basis of free speech.
So while you can quibble over yelling "fire" in a theater, silencing speech against prosecution from the government is diametrically opposed to the intent of the first amendment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
"Virtually everyone" is not qualified to make a constitution, and if by "the courts" you mean the SCOTUS, then the courts have a history of doing a lot of stupid things based on personal bias.
It's one thing for lawmakers to get tripped up on finer points of Constitutional law with which the Supreme Court disagrees with. It's quite another to just play this "catch me if you can" game trying to push the limits of what is possible while ignoring the Bill of Rights.
A lot more about the fourth ammendment -- unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to be "secure in your papers and effects" -- the one that says they need a warrant and ordinarily need to let you know the warrant was served). Don't it?
The constitution is not a suicide pact. That is, the system cannot interpret the various provisions of the constitution in such a way that would destroy the country. The Declaration of Independence is a statement of philosophy. The constitution is a rather vague and self-contradictory description of structure. Different thing entirely.
Having said that, what has happened is that 240 years has given all the players in government a chance to find edge cases where they can have their way at the expense of others.
What we're seeing now is a state of perpetual war. This was never envisioned when the country was founded. So we're way off the script.
Isn't it? It seems like it was intended to be a set of fully strict provisions, and if they didn't work, everyone had to agree on changing it.
Such as when it falls into a perpetual state of war. Like they complained about England doing. I think it was well envisioned and it's well on script. However, the Founders believed the separation of powers between branches would create adequate checks and balances to prevent it from happening. I think they failed to envision the case where said branches would collude and ignore the rules to protect each other's power quid pro quo, and most people would not notice and not be bothered.
At the least, our use and interpretation of the Constitution has explicitly discounted individual rights in favor of the collective state since approximately Lincoln. Against 150 years of tradition, what the Founders intended (up to and including the arming of the populace as a deterrent against tyranny) is largely irrelevant.
Note: My point is not at all about gun control, it's just the first example of inconsistency that I had in mind. Not starting any debate here.
How do you know? It seems to me like the people who wrote the constitution (and authored/ratified the Bill of Rights) were willing to risk everything to achieve the freedoms enumerated in the constitution and its subsequent amendments. While I'm probably projecting my own opinions onto them to some extent, it seems to me that the founders of the United States would rather see the nation fall apart than become what they set out to destroy.
Poppycock.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Around January, upon logging into the Google account, Google showed a strange NOTICE message asking me to accept the terms of usage of my account. This was odd, because in a decade of being a Google user, I had never seen this. I am told that this is Google's way of "telling you without telling you" that you have been served an NSL. Google, by law, is not allowed to tell you about the NSL, but they definitely are within their right to ask you to accept their TOS upon login. This is the "tell" that everyone here should be aware of. If you see this, you are likely being monitored.
Google asked all of us who had been around longer than a certain amount of time to re-sign our NDAs because "they lost them" or they "didn't get signed your first day of work" or something like that. I asked to see a copy of the old version so I could diff it (visually, ugh) to see what I was supposedly agreeing to in the new one.
They provided the old version all right... not AN old version, THE old version. As in, the actual (scanned) copy I signed my first day of work... and it had my signature on it, right next to the date, just as I remembered it.
I found out much later they pulled this on a whole bunch of people.
If ever there were an example of G not being Evil, this is it. Hats off to them for how hard they work to keep the man away from our data.
It makes me sad to see the authorities of countries like the US using entrapment and other dodgy tactics to catch criminals. The US is soon to become like 1984 with drones monitoring people in cities, huge cloud computers monitoring all internet traffic, and feds running lawless tapping everyone's phones.
The UK has no equivalent to the Fifth Amendment. In the UK, it is a crime not to give up your encryption keys to the police when requested. The punishment for keeping secret keys secret is two years in prison if you are suspected of most crimes, and five years in prison if you are suspected of "heinous" crimes.
The UK also does not have something like the 4th amendment, which means that things like the Terrorism Act 2000 pass without challenge. Admittedly, the USA has been just as bad in this regard (with such things as the PATRIOT act), but I suppose some of the blame has to go towards the public attitude immediately following 9/11.
In the landmark United States case Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, the SCOTUS ruled 7-2 that there was an implicit right to privacy in the United States constitution, backed by Constitutional Amendments 1,3,4,5,9, and 14. This right to privacy has not yet been used to protect internet privacy, but considering that the internet as we know it has been around for only 20 or so years, this is not exactly surprising. SCOTUS judges have a history of voting for a right to privacy despite their own personal beliefs, as demonstrated in Griswold v. CT, Bowers v. Hardwick, Roe v. Wade, etc. so this should hold up when it comes to internet privacy as well.
And then, of course, there's the UK's history of egregious privacy rights violations, including widespread state-sponsored video surveillance, suspicion-less stop-and-searches, extensive usage of web-filtering system, and even deep packet inspection of and tampering with content transferred over HTTP.
So the funny thing is that the UK already has extensive monitoring of people in cities, huge cloud computers monitoring their traffic, and extensive wiretapping. What you're describing as a terrible future for the US is already a reality in the UK.
That's true, if by "does not have something like the 4th amendment" you mean "has Article 8 of the ECHR", and by "which means that things like the Terrorism Act 2000 pass without challenge", you mean "which means that things like the [suspicionless stop&search powers under the] Terrorism Act 2000 are ruled illegal by the European Court of Human Rights[1] under Article 8 and consequently repealed under s. 10 of the Human Rights Act[2]"
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8453878.stm ; http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=001-...
Also, your assertion that you have more privacy than Americans is almost as ridiculous as Americans saying they have more freedom than the Chinese. We're all oppressed in slightly different ways.
We all (myself included) talk about the government in the third person. Yet, it is supposed to be our representative and our voice. It is supposed to be "us".
So, why are we so powerless to stop things like this, the Aaron Swartz tragedy, PATRIOT Act, etc?
Personally, I think it's because we buy into the idea that an individual should be given the authority to "rule" people by fiat in the first place.
In simple terms, the solution is for the voters not to fall for such nonsense.
"The people" can turn it around anytime they want. When enough voters shout "frog", Congress jumps. But getting that many people to shout at the holes we have seen shot in our Constitution is not so easy.
You asked why? Okay, first reason is that there are problems, and conceptually the easiest solution is for Congress to pass a law and the executive branch to set up a program. So, DC gets bigger, richer, and more powerful.
Second reason is that our gumment is heavily for sale at prices that are not high enough. So, lots of 'special interests' quietly get what they want, and gumment gets bigger.
So, gumment gets big and powerful, and then lots of people want to be part of this power and work to keep gumment big and powerful.
Third, out in voter land, there is not much in good information and a lot of confusion. Mostly people are fed, by the media joined at the hip with the politicians and other special interests, a lot of emotional nonsense that keeps up the divisions and, thus, forestalls a clear consensus on curing the problems.
My favorite example in the last election cycle was abortion. Take whatever view on abortion you want, there remains a rock solid fact: Roe v Wade was 40 years ago, and the chances of changing it are from zip and zilch down to zero. So, talking about abortion is essentially just a waste of time. Still there was a lot of such talking. Lots of people got concerned. Lots of women got scared. And the holes we were shooting in our Constitution were ignored. And the media was filled with stories about Brit and Lohan.
I hate that media nonsense. So, I stay informed as best I can from a few Internet sources and nearly totally ignore the MSM. E.g., I haven't touched a print news publication in likely over 10 years. I have TV only because for one year it's a little cheaper to have it, but I have no TV set connected to the settop box and don't watch TV. I'm doing a startup, and in part I hope it does something about this mess and results in better informed voters and better gumment.
But, even with that, I wonder which group specifically benefits from the kinds of abuse we see with NSLs and the Aaron Swartz tragedy? You can easily see how security firms and the defense industry benefit from war, new technology for airports, etc. So, there is a direct path from the lobbyists to the politicians back to the corporate interests.
But, where privacy is simply being invaded or abusive power wielded over an individual, you ask: who is directly benefiting? There is certainly interest in maintaining the status quo by the same moneyed interests noted above (and others), so that is ostensibly the purpose of such abuse and control.
But how, precisely, does that interest translate to these abuses? How is this effort to control by removing rights or infringing upon them communicated to those who execute? Who is communicating it to them?
Because this, seemingly, is at least one place where the gumment takes on the role of a third entity that is no longer representative of the people, but frequently at odds with them.
"[A court] may impose a civil penalty of up to $10,000 per day for each day in violation after the issuance of the order or after such future date as the court may specify."
May this wikipedia page bring the answer that you seek.
In this case, I'm more worried about the "lots to lose" part than about the "nothing to win" one. For some reason I'm even fine with doing charity work for the benefit of billion-dollar corporations from time to time [1]. But not if there's the risk of them coming after me in the future...
[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/cc308589.aspx
National Soccer League?
Sometimes going right to Google isn't the fastest way.
They were one of the (many) things bush used the 9/11 as an excuse to push through congress.
I was amused by the entrapment bit. They always try that. I think of this poor black guy who got recruited into a fake islamic jihad gang and how they gave him a fake bomb and rented a synagogue for him to leave it in and he got jumped by 50 cops on the way out the door, yelling "Allah Akbar"
On some level I feel bad for him, but you've got to be a dope to fall for that.
Or you can be poor or indebted or having some weakness they know how to exploit.
Everyone has buttons someone can push, especially if they have access to your online data.
It is funny how many people will email you though. I wrote a tiny, babycakes cracking tutorial, just to demonstrate how reversing most "protection" that average devs do is pretty easy. Even years later, I get emails from people begging me to crack stuff for them. I always tell them off. But sometimes they're persistent and come up with stories as to why they really need help and here's the DLL.
I was with you until here. This is victim blaming. You don't "deserve" it even if you're a dope. Entrapment is illegal for a reason.
I think there are going to be a lot of sadly amusing and moronic stories to come.
"Hacker is the Computer Crime Card Game. It was inspired by the 1990 Secret Service raid on SJ Games."
http://www.sjgames.com/ourgames/card.html (very last game)
I have a friend that has this, although I haven't played it.
SS confirmed over the phone that they monitored my Google account,
after I told them I knew they were. At first, they would not tell me
they did and denied it. The agent actually said "Google should not
have told you that"
no digital information is protected from
snooping unless it is stored in your home
and encrypted.
"By reading this, you have denied its [some type of government surveillance] existence and implied consent."
Very troubling news.
I'm sure OP knew what he was getting into, unless he actually thought he lived in Wonderland.
Apologize for irrelevancy of the comment. Someone needed to let squeed know.