Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its different because not only do mailmen not open mail as a matter of course, for advertising or operational purposes, its a felony to do so.
Do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy for your bedroom or can the government freely search that too? Does your answer change after you hire a housekeeper (or housekeeping company) to dust your furniture and put away your socks?
We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email
91–94 of 94 posts
Re: We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciated the comment because I do not want to bother navigating to a paywall'd page. And I'd be happy if these publications didn't stay in business.
What do you mean by "these publications"? Do you want any on-line publications to stay in business, and if so, how do you expect them to support themselves?
I eagerly contribute to online publications that use other types of business-models: wikipedia, democracynow, TVO, individuals with high-quality blogs, etc.
Paying a for-profit company to do work is not a moral good, it's not a charity. If they can't stay in business, that's hardly my problem. If they want to be a non-profit or charity, then I'd be more inclined to contribute, and that structure might help them produce a higher-quality work anyway.
Re: We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wouldn't surprise me if the feds are sharply limited in what they can pay for warrant-wise. There's a good chance they simply didn't legally have the option of waiting and paying $2k. Understandably, the government does not want "I have a warrant" to become the sound of a cash cow begging to be milked. If I were to guess, I would say control is actually a huge issue. If it's their equipment and software that's cer…
Excellent points, which I didn't think of. However, I'll ask you this: is it constitutionally agreeable to trample the rights of others for the sake of gathering evidence? I would say no. Just like how I would say searching all personal mail coming from a certain zip code because you know of someone sending secrets would be, in my viewpoint, wrong. I can chalk up the initial issue of a warrant to the judge not unders…
I think it's about collecting evidence in the least invasive way possible. To me, the priority is limiting damage while still allowing law enforcement to function. One of the key privacy advantages of how LE access to phone companies or gmail or similar is implemented that it allows them to be granted access to just the data in question and little more.
What really becomes a problem is when the evidence in question is only available from one source and there's no way to do it that doesn't run the risk of what I'm going to term information bycatch. At that point there are really only two viable options - allow the collection with bycatch or disallow the collection due to bycatch.
The first is a significant privacy risk. That said, it's also not a new one. As long as people have kept records or written letters, a search has run the risk of exposing the private information of other unrelated people. Certainly, the same concern applies to tapping phone calls, and that's permitted by courts.
The second runs the risk of hobbling law enforcement entirely. Without perfect knowledge of what a given document, packet, phone call, etc. might contain, it's impossible to say that a search will or will not invade the privacy of another person in addition to the subject.
My understanding is that a warrant is for information or items because it's known and understood that information bycatch isn't always avoidable. This is considered unfortunate but unavoidable, as there cannot always be assumed to be other and better options.
I think this goes back to my earlier point about design. If a system isn't designed to contain any breach, then any breach - legal or otherwise - will be uncontained. I think this is less a constitutional problem than it is a technology one.
Re: We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the analogy the customer is the landlord giving access to the could service. Giving someone access to your property does not automatically give the government the right to search it.
Obviously Google is the landlord, since it owns the servers and you're just renting space on them to put your property. In any case, your analogy doesn't work either way you phrase it. If you're the landlord, and Google is the tenant, then the government doesn't need your permission to access the property, just Google's. The government can't break in and search the servers, but it can get the documents with a valid s…
"On Thursday Microsoft will oppose the U.S. government at a hearing in federal court in New York, arguing that it can't force American tech companies to turn over customer emails..."