121–130 of 447 posts
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Then they would seize his phone and use that to decrypt the email. Or order him to turn over his own email.
> Or order him to turn over his own email. Which they could have done in this case. So why subpoena Google?
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I would agree with you if our legal systems were built for that, but our legal systems are built to deal with a society that has privacy. People unknowingly commit crimes, or implicate themselves in crimes, all the time, because there are too many ways to do that. No reasonable person can be expected to avoid committing crimes when the government itself can't even keep track of the number of criminal laws there are.[…
I wrote this comment elsewhere below but it still applies The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute. How is this any different?
So the difference is seeing something through a window with curtains vs. having a camera installed in the room. In principle, not so different. In practice there really is no comparison. It is basically a warrant to ruffle through someone's life.
Is this different in any practical sense to an old fashioned request for physical paper documents? The only difference I can think of is traditionally documents are destroyed after they are no longer needed. Now they can see “deleted” documents and document change history. i.e. emails stored locally on a personal or company server can be permanently destroyed. Traditional email systems won’t have a change history of…
Just that the measure of recorded data is perhaps several orders of magnitude larger that it was merely ~20-30 years ago.
I think back to my life in the 90s, and what information was recorded about me as I went about my day-to-day life, and it was minuscule compared to today. You could track who I called, but not what I said. You could track some of my purchases, but I used electronic forms of payment much less then.
Now, I text or message much more than I voice call, so that is all recorded. Every now and then if I want to get really freaked out I go to myactivity.google.com (I've got an Android phone and am otherwise "all in" on Google services) and, say, playback my location history, search history, or everything I've said to Google assistant.
I think we are really just coming to terms with the fact that "ephemera" no longer really exists, and the deep impact this will have on society.
I (and we should all) act as if this could happen to anyone. Essentially that the state can deputize any company to snitch on the digital ephemera that constitutes our daily lives, but especially those that we are deeply engaged: Google, Facebook, Lyft, Amazon. As such, we should not self-censor, but instead disengage from these proxy-cops and move to more distributed spaces.
State has a duty to prosecute law breakers. This is a load bearing wall of civil society. Everywhere. Making sweeping general statements is good for riling up the mobs but I would implore HN readers to be more pragmatic about these things. Look at the context. This person sought to ignite racial tensions for personal gain. He was given a sweetheart deal. The State is going after him and those protected him. They (the…
Another thing to keep in mind: “igniting racial tensions” as an investigatory justification was how MLK got labeled the gravest domestic security threat to the United States. You’re advocating a categorical justification with a fraught and bloody history.
Better civilian oversight is overdue.
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The scariest part is that this amount of data access can be very effectively weaponized to build a strong case against anyone . All of us are inadvertently breaking some law or the other all the time. If the government doesn't like you for any reason they are one court order away from blackmailing you or putting you away.
> they are one court order away The implication being that the courts are corrupt? If that's the case I think you have way worse things to worry about than "data access", the courts have much greater powers than that.
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State has a duty to prosecute law breakers. This is a load bearing wall of civil society. Everywhere. Making sweeping general statements is good for riling up the mobs but I would implore HN readers to be more pragmatic about these things. Look at the context. This person sought to ignite racial tensions for personal gain. He was given a sweetheart deal. The State is going after him and those protected him. They (the…
“Ignite racial tensions”? There was no chance of that happening. Smollett was a laughingstock the day the story hit the news. Foxx declined to prosecute because she correctly saw it as a ridiculous and embarrassing stunt. Another thing to keep in mind: “igniting racial tensions” as an investigatory justification was how MLK got labeled the gravest domestic security threat to the United States. You’re advocating a cat…
Mens rea is the guilty mind required for something to be a crime. Intent matters as much as outcome or chance of outcome in the judgement of whether a crime has occurred, and explains the use of "sought" in the comment you replied to.
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I wrote this comment elsewhere below but it still applies The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute. How is this any different?
If you add all those records together you get a fraction of the information you get from someone's Google history. We're talking records like search history, live GPS data and emails. That is a completely different level of scrutiny. So the difference is seeing something through a window with curtains vs. having a camera installed in the room. In principle, not so different. In practice there really is no comparison.…
Which, for what it's worth, is a warrant that is perfectly within the powers of a judge to grant.
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He allegedly did something quite bad, and if guilty I’d like him to face justice. But if the cost of convicting him is setting a precedent that effectively strips hundreds of millions of people of their privacy and subjects us all to an unofficial form of state surveillance, then let him walk.
The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute. This is a necessary "evil". We give up some freedoms so that we have a civilisation and an orderly society. And this isn't setting up any precedent that is egregious. This is on the front page of Chicago Tribune newspaper and on the front page of H…
Be wary of the motte-and-bailey fallacy - the issue is not that The State can look at certain records in certain prosecutions, its that the records currently being requested are too broad and too potentially intimate to trust The State with.
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State has a duty to prosecute law breakers. This is a load bearing wall of civil society. Everywhere. Making sweeping general statements is good for riling up the mobs but I would implore HN readers to be more pragmatic about these things. Look at the context. This person sought to ignite racial tensions for personal gain. He was given a sweetheart deal. The State is going after him and those protected him. They (the…
He allegedly did something quite bad, and if guilty I’d like him to face justice. But if the cost of convicting him is setting a precedent that effectively strips hundreds of millions of people of their privacy and subjects us all to an unofficial form of state surveillance, then let him walk.
There's no new precedent involved, noone ever had any privacy whatsoever from a properly court-approved search. What's the most privacy-invasive thing I can think of? If a judge believes there's probable cause in searching your anus and other internal cavities and authorizes such a search, then such a search is compatible with all the precedent regarding fourth amendment in USA.
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> they are one court order away The implication being that the courts are corrupt? If that's the case I think you have way worse things to worry about than "data access", the courts have much greater powers than that.
Courts may or may not be corrupt, but regardless of that it hasn't historically been very difficult for authorities to find a judge to sign off on a very wide-reaching warrant (like this very case).