...and pondering more on it: why should businesses not benefit from the same rights to privacy as individuals do?
I actually don't think the third party doctrine has that much to do with call detail records. The issue is not only that they are held by a third party but that, at least when this was originally litigated, they weren't really that expressive, and there is already a major question as to whether historic cell site location data (also covered by the order btw) is protected, with already circuit splits forming on the issue.
His argument is that: it would be inconvenient to follow the 4th amendment in the 21st century, because computers give people the technical power to have conversations in private that would be otherwise need to be public, so government should ignore the 4th amendment.
In short, there is no such interpretation, but government lackeys and show-off contrarians make up sophistic excuses for the governments illegal actions.
It's utterly absurd to suggest that technology gives us more opportunities for private conversations now than it did when audio and video couldn't be recorded and when written correspondence existed in the form of single-instance physical documents that could be sealed and examined for tampering.
So if the fourth amendment is to remain "technology-neutral", we need to be far more aggressive in its application, not less so. Encryption is, at best, a tool that helps people restore the former level of privacy that they would have expected in their correspondence.
I don't think its worth a strained interpretation of the 4th amendment to achieve this purpose. If it is desired, it would be better to make it a statutory or common law privilege (e.g. like the kind that applies to confidential communications between clients and their lawyers).
> Why should doing something via a 3rd party business make the information concerning what you do less "intimate"?
Because information that is voluntarily exposed to third parties is almost by definition not "intimate"?
Technologists tend to be fundamentally mistaken about the nature of the information at issue in privacy debates like this. AT&T's logs of your calls are not your information. They're AT&T's information. Romantic notions of internet technology aside, this is the physical nature of things: it's AT&T's data collected by AT&T's routers and wireless base stations, sitting on AT&T's servers. It's not your private information, at least not in the technical sense.
To use an analogy: you can object to the government listening in on a private dinner party at your house. You can't object to the government asking one of your guests what was said at the dinner party. You can't assert your privacy right over information that isn't yours.
> ...and pondering more on it: why should businesses not benefit from the same rights to privacy as individuals do?
They do. They just don't care to assert that right to protect the data they have on individuals.
Does this mean we expect, Constitutionally, for them to be penetrated by government overseers?
If the Constitutional protection were about one's diary, something one expects never to transmit to another, that would be another matter, but the clause is implicitly understood to apply to information transmission and storage between people.
You'd be better off starting from a list of big Federal agencies that aren't violating the Constitution every day of the week.
It's not speculation that Echelon existed, it's an openly admitted fact that the program was not only developed but live. It was used to help catch, as two examples: Pablo Escobar and Carlos the Jackal.
However, NSA also conducts clandestine operations. Employees selected for those operations are probably recommended based on their willingness and trustworthiness when it comes to spying on US citizens and effectively breaking the law.
Alternatively, as has been suggested recently in numerous articles, FBI probably works hand-in-hand with NSA to "legally" allocate information required for datamining. To the employees of the clandestine operations, the information obtained is technically "legal", so perhaps that serves to settle the nerves of the employees involved.
Then perhaps some will wonder, how come people mistrust the government?
The Constitution was written centuries ago. Before internet, before phones. And I guess for a long time people trusted the government to keep up with the spirit of the Constitution. It seems the opposite is happening. Those who one expects to know, respect and defend it are the ones chipping away at its edges, bit by bit.
This leads to trust issues. It is like entrusting someone with a job, and then they find a way to screw it up then come back and say technically I didn't do anything wrong because "I followed all the rules". Yes they followed all the rules, but they also managed to lose the trust. Now the relationship is adversarial as opposed to one of mutual support.
Now I always wondered about the peons. They ones working in the trenches who have implemented all these technical "features" . One or two have come out and revealed it. What about others? Will there be death bed confessions, 20 years from now? Don't anyone of them care or see what they are doing or what they are enabling? Just wondering what goes on in their heads.
The commerce clause, and numerous laws leading up to it, were the major opening. It made the lobbying boom possible by giving the government direct control over the economy (and therefore lobbyists acquired reason to lobby, and reason to buy politicians).
All powers not expressly granted to the government were to be outside their province. They switched that, such that any powers not expressly denied the government were to be assumed to be in their province.
Perhaps they're afraid of prosecution (or worse). After all, they would know more than anyone exactly what the government is capable of...
Of all the electronic device you own that are capable of being exploited for automated surveillance, your PC or Mac is probably the only thing that is not actually being used for automated surveillance (not counting your web browsing habits, and provided you don't have any spyware on your computer). How dare you use a computing device that (hopefully) does not have any backdoors built into it, is not locked into any vendor's monthly payment plan, is not locked into any vendor's proprietary OS, and even supports "terrorist" techniques such as full-disk encryption?
Fortunately for Big Brother, key hardware components of general-purpose computers are only produced by a handful of corporations such as Intel and AMD. Don't be surprised if they agree to build all sorts of defects-by-design into their processors, graphics cards, HDDs/SSDs, etc. There are already plenty of excuses: I have popcorn ready for the day when graphics cards finally implement security systems to prevent them from being used for bitcoin mining or password brute-forcing.
The FSF should change their name to FCF, Free Computing Foundation. We need them badly, more than ever before.
[1] Cory Doctorow, "The Coming War on General Computation", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
You don't need spyware to do that: http://www.experian.com/hitwise/hitwise-methodology.html
When the AT&T closet fiasco was revealed, it was a short-lived outrage.
The fact that the library of congress has signed a deal archiving all tweets is extremely odd.
The amount of ex-intelligence employees at facebook is just astounding.
The fact that .ir and .us cointelpro agents have built duqu and stux is amazing - the capabilities of those sytems is crazy.
We live in a cyber WWIII - and its largely invisible to 99% of the world.
The Constitution is arguably no longer the governing law for the US Federal Government. Their behavior indicates it's optional as to whether they follow it (and there haven't exactly been big consequences to not following it, we keep giving them more money to spend to expand the abuse).
I can't think of a federal action, even this one, that is blatantly unconstitutional. The problem is that you don't like what the Constitution says. You want things like the 4th amendment, which protects you against invasive searches of your home and person, to apply to information like that the NSA is collecting that is not private at all (and indeed is not even in your possession, being collected and stored by an independent third party).
You want to act like the government has turned away from the Constitution, but the case is rather that you want to re-litigate the boundaries of Constitutional protections. There has never been the kind of blanket protection of "privacy" that technologists like to claim applies to the internet. "Privacy" in that sense is a concept that largely post-dates the founding (the 4th amendment is better understood not as a privacy protection, but as a protection against the indignity and invasiveness of illegal searches). If the founders had meant to create a blanket protection of "privacy" they would have done so.
Oh, really?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s976iyaO39A
In the first few minutes of that Bill Binney says this:
"I was focused at foreign threats. The problems I solved, and the way I solved them, were directed at foreign threats, and foreign potential threats. Unfortunately, after 9/11 they took my solutions and directed them at this country, and everybody in it."
Probably?
And the NSA chip fab...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/29/1456242/hiding-b...
