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> If you're going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. > That was the original intention of the 4th amendment. Wat. The inten

> If you're going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. > That was the original intention of the 4th amendment. Wat. The intention of the 4th amendment was to enable criminal activity, but confine it to private property? Not to protect citizens' privacy from government snooping without probable cause? The intent was to prevent the executive branch from indiscriminately "searching" (and hidden microphones are a form of search) innocent people without any cross-check from the judicial branch. The fact that you can "conduct criminal activity in the privacy of your own home" is a side effect, not a design goal, of the principle that a free society is worth the risk of letting a few criminals slip through the cracks.

pessimizer 10y ago
And why pretend that the privacy of your home is so special? The only thing keeping laser microphones from being aimed at all of our windows is a 5-4 decision in Kylio v. US, and Scalia is dead, and Clinton is going to be appointing the next Supreme Court justice. Clinton (DLC) Democrats love surveillance even more than Bushes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States edit: If you downvote, I'd appreciate you telling me why what I said is incorrect, instead of possibly reflexively reacting to the fact that Scalia is being mentioned in a positive way and Clinton in a negative way.
- StanislavPetrov 10y ago
  >Clinton (DLC) Democrats love surveillance even more than Bushes. I'd disagree. The complete and absolute infatuation with surveillance by both the Bush's and the Clinton's is the same.
  - NotSammyHagar 10y ago
    Pessimizer, I think you are wrong, I agree with Stanislav. Republicans don't believe in the right to privacy, they use that as the reason why Texas should be able to restrict dildo sales (among many other things :-)), for instance, and conservatives use their disbelief in privacy to argue they should be able to legislate against consensual sex practices they don't like. Dems generally do support a right to privacy in your home.
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      Instead of depending on generalizations, I'd say that without Clarence Thomas and Scalia (and also Ginsberg, Breyer, and Souter), it would be legal today to record what goes on inside your home without a warrant. So to generalize about conservatives or liberals in this case would probably not be helpful because both the liberal-leaning and the conservative-leaning justices split. What is absolutely true is that the two most right-wing justices were on the side of the Fourth. All I'm saying is 1) that the next person to appoint a Supreme Court justice, and the last person to appoint a Supreme Court justice, are both New Democrats who seem hostile to Fourth Amendment defences against surveillance, and 2) that the author of the opinion that protects us from total audio surveillance, and the fiercest defender of the Fourth in the Court is the one currently being replaced. Take it as you will; I'm not hopeful at all, but there's nothing I can do about it anyway. I honestly believe that any justice that Emperor Trump would put on the court would be more likely to preserve that view than not, and the opposite would be true for any Clinton appointment.
      - hola_hola 10y ago
        Trump has no principles and flip-flops every other second so how can you know what he will do?
        woodman 10y ago
        That is a fair point, but a simple rephrasing sidesteps that and still maintains the thrust of the argument: a justice that readily defers to 4A is more likely to be appointed by an unprincipled flip-flopper than a consistent strong state advocate. It is the same logic that makes the selection of a half empty cylinder rational in a game of Russian roulette, when the alternative option is a full cylinder. A mechanism for a vote of no confidence sure would be nice right now.
      - srtjstjsj 10y ago
        Obama may be anti-4th, as nearly every President is (being an Executive whose rights are limited by the 4th), but his SCOTUS appointee isn't, at least as seen below: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/01/27/justice-sotomayor-on-her-privacy-opinion-remember-i-was-only-one-of-nine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
- lawpoop 10y ago
  First, Supreme Court Justices are pretty much inscrutable as far as their jurisprudence before they join the bench (see: just about any justice in modern history). Knowing anything about the president's political leanings tells us next to nothing about how their nominees will decide cases, beyond knowing the nominee themself. Second, as soon as Trump and Clinton are locked in (after the conventions), the Republicans will cave on Merrick Garland, rather than have Clinton nominate someone. The next Supreme Court justice is Merrick Garland, an Obama nominee.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    This is a possibility, but if they don't cave, Clinton is not putting in Merrick Garland. And I don't know that Merrick Garland has any sympathy for Scalia's argument. This is a case where the more liberal justices tended towards an anti-fourth argument as long as the surveillance was done in a public place, and neither Obama nor Clinton have shown themselves to have a problem with universal surveillance that I'm aware of, in any case, ever.
    - lawpoop 10y ago
      There's no reason they won't cave. McConnell even put forth Garland as a nominee they'd like to see from Obama, even though "he'd never nominate him". I was going to say this is the devil they know, but in this case, it's actually the devil they've wanted.
      - LyndsySimon 10y ago
        > There's no reason they won't cave. Before the election, sure there is. The optimal course would be to wait until the elections happen (or at least until polling shows a clear advantage one way or another), then either approve Garland or refuse until Trump is inaugurated.
- woodman 10y ago
  > The only thing keeping laser microphones... The legality has nothing to do with it, as it has been demonstrated over and over that law enforcement will employ methods that can charitably be described as "legally questionable" and then attempt to hide it (see stingray). What is stopping them is limitations imposed by the physical world - both in number of windows and the fact that laser mics don't work the way they're portrayed on television. This is the reason why digital key escrow is infinitely more dangerous than physical key escrow (like fire department lockboxes).
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Laser mics can get better, and I've got a window in every room but the closets.
    - woodman 10y ago
      I was pointing more to the fact that angle of incidence needs to be carefully figured into the placement of both the emitter and receiver - for every window. Better laser mics won't change laser physics or the logistical challenges.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Clinton winning in November is far from a sure bet, IYAM.
acchow 10y ago
> Not to protect citizens' privacy from government snooping without probable cause? > The fact that you can "conduct criminal activity in the privacy of your own home" is a side effect, not a design goal, of the principle that a free society is worth the risk of letting a few criminals slip through the cracks. You can't really separate the two ideas. If you look hard enough, every single person is a criminal. That's why we can't have total surveillance. We would end up with either total prosecution or, more likely, selective prosecution by those in power silencing the dissidents. So, actually, grandparent post has it "more" correct. The goal is to let everyone be a criminal (since we all are in some way other) and the means to that goal is preventing "government snooping without probable cause".
- bigiain 10y ago
  This is a much deeper problem - there are so many laws, and so little public knowledge of many of them, that it's pretty close to being true that anyone the government wants to coerce into doing something against their own interest can probably be threatened with being charged with something (with at least reasonable chance of success in convicting). When the best unpaid legal advice you can find says "Don't talk to police" already* - think how much worse that situation is going to get if the FBI gets away with saying "recording every conversation you ever have in a public place just in case we want to take it out of context and use it as evidence against you is entirely legal, moral, and ethical, and no warrant or any form of external oversight is required for us to do it". When "every single person is a criminal", there's a deeply disturbing imbalance in power between law enforcement and the populace. It won't just be the dissidents, it'll be everybody that stands in the way of career-climbing LEO or profit seeking civil-asset-forfiture-funded LEO organisations (in fact in my worst dystopian imaginings, not prosecuting selected dissidents will be how the LEO community controls the political class...) *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
  - geggam 10y ago
    When "every single person is a criminal", That is tyranny ^
mtgx 10y ago
> If you're going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. Meanwhile: http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-fbi-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny-wiretapping-your-a-1776092971 http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-fbi-can-neither-confirm-n... Soon they'll say "if you're going to do or say 'bad stuff', just do it in your own head". And then we'll have technologies that can read and "hear" what our brains think all around us.
- smsm42 10y ago
  Well, if you voluntarily put in your home device designed to listen to you around the clock, and send the data out, you can't complain it listens to you and sends the data out, can you?
  - bigiain 10y ago
    That's pretty much exactly what Snowden is telling us we do when we choose to carry a cell phone...
    - smsm42 10y ago
      Cell phone is not designed to listen to you all the time. But yes, it is designed for you to be contact-able all the time, so the premise of somebody knowing your (rough) location is there.
      - spacemanmatt 10y ago
        Your cell phone is designed to do is maker's bidding. It only has to record when they want it to. You aren't interesting, today. Tomorrow is another day.
BurningFrog 10y ago
With the semi-libertarian concept of "crime" the founders had, it is quite hard to commit a crime in your own home.
- squarology 10y ago
  ummm... murder?
- nine_k 10y ago
  Murder is one example.
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    Indeed. When all crime is property crime, you must have someone else's person or property present to commit a crime. Whether your body is your property or not is for another philosophy debate.
rayiner 10y ago
A bit of a and a bit of b. The intention was to protect private property from government snooping without probable cause. It was a way to balance property rights against the governments' law-enforcement powers.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Could you qualify your use of "private property" to account for the many ways in which the "property rights" are assessed in terms of the 4A, e.g. in terms of surveillance?
  - rayiner 10y ago
    Personally, I don't think the 4th amendment has much to say about surveillance. It protects four enumerated property rights: houses, persons, papers, and effects. If you have a property right in something, the government needs a warrant. If you don't, it doesn't. I don't think surveillance is good, but I'm strongly opposed to twisting the interpretation of the Constitution to fight in courts battles that should be fought in the political realm. We have a real problem with excessive surveillance and over-policing in the US (but also in the UK and other places, to be fair). But the people want safety and security. That's democracy.
    - arca_vorago 10y ago
      I would just like to point out something, not entirely focused at you, but because I see that phrase and similar about "well thats democracy for ya.." America is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Democratic Republic. Words have meaning, And I would highly suggest that anyone reading this, begin using that phrase when referencing our government. A democracy is mob rule, and with a "mob" so ruled by propaganda and easily influenced by the oligarchy corrupted fourth estate, democracy without the Constition or Representative government is nothing but doom. What America needs is to forget their petty hegellian dialect issues, unite around the enlightenment ideals that inspired our hard won revolution from the british Monarchy, and focus on the return to and enforcment of the principles of the Constitution.
bawigga 10y ago
I watched the end of this video and had to do a double take (watch?). Said out loud 'wat'!, came here and found out that I still have never had an original thought. Thanks!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Gibbon1 10y ago
I've come to the opinion that warrants are simply there to provide an audit trail. The executive branch needs to provide a record of what it's up to to the Judicial branch. If you think in terms of that, current attempts by the executive branch to spy on people without warrants is extremely alarming. You have to ask, why exactly do they have a problem with informing the Judicial branch what they are doing?
fsaneq2 10y ago
I'm pretty sure she was just being sarcastic...
rtpg 10y ago
The 4th ammendment is meant to protect you from the power imbalance with the government. Or at least that's how it seems to be interpreted by the courts. Kyllo v. US ruled that heat-cameras mounted on helicopters were considered a "search" and could not be committed without a warrant because most people do not have heat-cameras and helicopters. But everyone has ears (and microphones obstensibly work as well as ears in public spaces). The government has the right to investigate on the same level as normal citizens, in a way. Binoculars are also fair game, because a lot of people have binoculars. The "expectation of privacy" is usually evaluated as "if somebody could try to spy on me, would they be able to do so relatively easily?" In a way, this 4th ammendment interpretation is what protects us from NSA mass-surveillance. Because only very few people have the resources necessary to set up such a network, you can end up with an expectation of privacy. And while you don't have an expectation of privacy with regards to tor nodes (anybody running a node could be trying to watch you), IIRC expectation of privacy comes in if , as in the recent case, the gov't runs a very large amounts of nodes and cross-references the data to "find" people.
rdtsc 10y ago
> Wat. It is true if it is true for you. Let's pay attention who says it: "Jeff Harp, a KPIX 5 security analyst and former FBI special agent" That is absolutely how FBI and large parts of the executive branch see the Constitution. This annoying piece of paper, that prevents them doing their job, and enables criminals to get away with crimes.
srtjstjsj 10y ago
The formet FBI agent was lying through his teeth, and that's why he caged by adding the line about the judge. The FBI believes (as do criminals and defense attorneys) that whatever they do is legal unless they are caught, tried, and convicted -- facts in the court, not facts on the ground. And the FBI gets the privilege of being mostly free from law enforcement oversight in the first place.

pessimizer 10y ago

And why pretend that the privacy of your home is so special? The only thing keeping laser microphones from being aimed at all of our windows is a 5-4 decision in Kylio v. US, and Scalia is dead, and Clinton is going to be appointing the next Supreme Court justice. Clinton (DLC) Democrats love surveillance even more than Bushes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States edit: If you downvote, I'd appreciate you telling me why what I said is incorrect, instead of possibly reflexively reacting to the fact that Scalia is being mentioned in a positive way and Clinton in a negative way.

StanislavPetrov 10y ago
>Clinton (DLC) Democrats love surveillance even more than Bushes. I'd disagree. The complete and absolute infatuation with surveillance by both the Bush's and the Clinton's is the same.
- NotSammyHagar 10y ago
  Pessimizer, I think you are wrong, I agree with Stanislav. Republicans don't believe in the right to privacy, they use that as the reason why Texas should be able to restrict dildo sales (among many other things :-)), for instance, and conservatives use their disbelief in privacy to argue they should be able to legislate against consensual sex practices they don't like. Dems generally do support a right to privacy in your home.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Instead of depending on generalizations, I'd say that without Clarence Thomas and Scalia (and also Ginsberg, Breyer, and Souter), it would be legal today to record what goes on inside your home without a warrant. So to generalize about conservatives or liberals in this case would probably not be helpful because both the liberal-leaning and the conservative-leaning justices split. What is absolutely true is that the two most right-wing justices were on the side of the Fourth. All I'm saying is 1) that the next person to appoint a Supreme Court justice, and the last person to appoint a Supreme Court justice, are both New Democrats who seem hostile to Fourth Amendment defences against surveillance, and 2) that the author of the opinion that protects us from total audio surveillance, and the fiercest defender of the Fourth in the Court is the one currently being replaced. Take it as you will; I'm not hopeful at all, but there's nothing I can do about it anyway. I honestly believe that any justice that Emperor Trump would put on the court would be more likely to preserve that view than not, and the opposite would be true for any Clinton appointment.
    - hola_hola 10y ago
      Trump has no principles and flip-flops every other second so how can you know what he will do?
      - woodman 10y ago
        That is a fair point, but a simple rephrasing sidesteps that and still maintains the thrust of the argument: a justice that readily defers to 4A is more likely to be appointed by an unprincipled flip-flopper than a consistent strong state advocate. It is the same logic that makes the selection of a half empty cylinder rational in a game of Russian roulette, when the alternative option is a full cylinder. A mechanism for a vote of no confidence sure would be nice right now.
    - srtjstjsj 10y ago
      Obama may be anti-4th, as nearly every President is (being an Executive whose rights are limited by the 4th), but his SCOTUS appointee isn't, at least as seen below: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/01/27/justice-sotomayor-on-her-privacy-opinion-remember-i-was-only-one-of-nine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
lawpoop 10y ago
First, Supreme Court Justices are pretty much inscrutable as far as their jurisprudence before they join the bench (see: just about any justice in modern history). Knowing anything about the president's political leanings tells us next to nothing about how their nominees will decide cases, beyond knowing the nominee themself. Second, as soon as Trump and Clinton are locked in (after the conventions), the Republicans will cave on Merrick Garland, rather than have Clinton nominate someone. The next Supreme Court justice is Merrick Garland, an Obama nominee.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  This is a possibility, but if they don't cave, Clinton is not putting in Merrick Garland. And I don't know that Merrick Garland has any sympathy for Scalia's argument. This is a case where the more liberal justices tended towards an anti-fourth argument as long as the surveillance was done in a public place, and neither Obama nor Clinton have shown themselves to have a problem with universal surveillance that I'm aware of, in any case, ever.
  - lawpoop 10y ago
    There's no reason they won't cave. McConnell even put forth Garland as a nominee they'd like to see from Obama, even though "he'd never nominate him". I was going to say this is the devil they know, but in this case, it's actually the devil they've wanted.
    - LyndsySimon 10y ago
      > There's no reason they won't cave. Before the election, sure there is. The optimal course would be to wait until the elections happen (or at least until polling shows a clear advantage one way or another), then either approve Garland or refuse until Trump is inaugurated.
woodman 10y ago
> The only thing keeping laser microphones... The legality has nothing to do with it, as it has been demonstrated over and over that law enforcement will employ methods that can charitably be described as "legally questionable" and then attempt to hide it (see stingray). What is stopping them is limitations imposed by the physical world - both in number of windows and the fact that laser mics don't work the way they're portrayed on television. This is the reason why digital key escrow is infinitely more dangerous than physical key escrow (like fire department lockboxes).
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Laser mics can get better, and I've got a window in every room but the closets.
  - woodman 10y ago
    I was pointing more to the fact that angle of incidence needs to be carefully figured into the placement of both the emitter and receiver - for every window. Better laser mics won't change laser physics or the logistical challenges.
ams6110 10y ago
Clinton winning in November is far from a sure bet, IYAM.

acchow 10y ago

> Not to protect citizens' privacy from government snooping without probable cause? > The fact that you can "conduct criminal activity in the privacy of your own home" is a side effect, not a design goal, of the principle that a free society is worth the risk of letting a few criminals slip through the cracks. You can't really separate the two ideas. If you look hard enough, every single person is a criminal. That's why we can't have total surveillance. We would end up with either total prosecution or, more likely, selective prosecution by those in power silencing the dissidents. So, actually, grandparent post has it "more" correct. The goal is to let everyone be a criminal (since we all are in some way other) and the means to that goal is preventing "government snooping without probable cause".

bigiain 10y ago
This is a much deeper problem - there are so many laws, and so little public knowledge of many of them, that it's pretty close to being true that anyone the government wants to coerce into doing something against their own interest can probably be threatened with being charged with something (with at least reasonable chance of success in convicting). When the best unpaid legal advice you can find says "Don't talk to police" already* - think how much worse that situation is going to get if the FBI gets away with saying "recording every conversation you ever have in a public place just in case we want to take it out of context and use it as evidence against you is entirely legal, moral, and ethical, and no warrant or any form of external oversight is required for us to do it". When "every single person is a criminal", there's a deeply disturbing imbalance in power between law enforcement and the populace. It won't just be the dissidents, it'll be everybody that stands in the way of career-climbing LEO or profit seeking civil-asset-forfiture-funded LEO organisations (in fact in my worst dystopian imaginings, not prosecuting selected dissidents will be how the LEO community controls the political class...) *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
- geggam 10y ago
  When "every single person is a criminal", That is tyranny ^

mtgx 10y ago

> If you're going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. Meanwhile: http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-fbi-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny-wiretapping-your-a-1776092971 http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-fbi-can-neither-confirm-n... Soon they'll say "if you're going to do or say 'bad stuff', just do it in your own head". And then we'll have technologies that can read and "hear" what our brains think all around us.

smsm42 10y ago
Well, if you voluntarily put in your home device designed to listen to you around the clock, and send the data out, you can't complain it listens to you and sends the data out, can you?
- bigiain 10y ago
  That's pretty much exactly what Snowden is telling us we do when we choose to carry a cell phone...
  - smsm42 10y ago
    Cell phone is not designed to listen to you all the time. But yes, it is designed for you to be contact-able all the time, so the premise of somebody knowing your (rough) location is there.
    - spacemanmatt 10y ago
      Your cell phone is designed to do is maker's bidding. It only has to record when they want it to. You aren't interesting, today. Tomorrow is another day.

BurningFrog 10y ago

With the semi-libertarian concept of "crime" the founders had, it is quite hard to commit a crime in your own home.

squarology 10y ago
ummm... murder?
nine_k 10y ago
Murder is one example.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  Indeed. When all crime is property crime, you must have someone else's person or property present to commit a crime. Whether your body is your property or not is for another philosophy debate.

rayiner 10y ago

A bit of a and a bit of b. The intention was to protect private property from government snooping without probable cause. It was a way to balance property rights against the governments' law-enforcement powers.

rhizome 10y ago
Could you qualify your use of "private property" to account for the many ways in which the "property rights" are assessed in terms of the 4A, e.g. in terms of surveillance?
- rayiner 10y ago
  Personally, I don't think the 4th amendment has much to say about surveillance. It protects four enumerated property rights: houses, persons, papers, and effects. If you have a property right in something, the government needs a warrant. If you don't, it doesn't. I don't think surveillance is good, but I'm strongly opposed to twisting the interpretation of the Constitution to fight in courts battles that should be fought in the political realm. We have a real problem with excessive surveillance and over-policing in the US (but also in the UK and other places, to be fair). But the people want safety and security. That's democracy.
  - arca_vorago 10y ago
    I would just like to point out something, not entirely focused at you, but because I see that phrase and similar about "well thats democracy for ya.." America is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Democratic Republic. Words have meaning, And I would highly suggest that anyone reading this, begin using that phrase when referencing our government. A democracy is mob rule, and with a "mob" so ruled by propaganda and easily influenced by the oligarchy corrupted fourth estate, democracy without the Constition or Representative government is nothing but doom. What America needs is to forget their petty hegellian dialect issues, unite around the enlightenment ideals that inspired our hard won revolution from the british Monarchy, and focus on the return to and enforcment of the principles of the Constitution.

bawigga 10y ago

I watched the end of this video and had to do a double take (watch?). Said out loud 'wat'!, came here and found out that I still have never had an original thought. Thanks!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Gibbon1 10y ago

I've come to the opinion that warrants are simply there to provide an audit trail. The executive branch needs to provide a record of what it's up to to the Judicial branch. If you think in terms of that, current attempts by the executive branch to spy on people without warrants is extremely alarming. You have to ask, why exactly do they have a problem with informing the Judicial branch what they are doing?

fsaneq2 10y ago

I'm pretty sure she was just being sarcastic...

rtpg 10y ago

The 4th ammendment is meant to protect you from the power imbalance with the government. Or at least that's how it seems to be interpreted by the courts. Kyllo v. US ruled that heat-cameras mounted on helicopters were considered a "search" and could not be committed without a warrant because most people do not have heat-cameras and helicopters. But everyone has ears (and microphones obstensibly work as well as ears in public spaces). The government has the right to investigate on the same level as normal citizens, in a way. Binoculars are also fair game, because a lot of people have binoculars. The "expectation of privacy" is usually evaluated as "if somebody could try to spy on me, would they be able to do so relatively easily?" In a way, this 4th ammendment interpretation is what protects us from NSA mass-surveillance. Because only very few people have the resources necessary to set up such a network, you can end up with an expectation of privacy. And while you don't have an expectation of privacy with regards to tor nodes (anybody running a node could be trying to watch you), IIRC expectation of privacy comes in if , as in the recent case, the gov't runs a very large amounts of nodes and cross-references the data to "find" people.

rdtsc 10y ago

> Wat. It is true if it is true for you. Let's pay attention who says it: "Jeff Harp, a KPIX 5 security analyst and former FBI special agent" That is absolutely how FBI and large parts of the executive branch see the Constitution. This annoying piece of paper, that prevents them doing their job, and enables criminals to get away with crimes.

srtjstjsj 10y ago

The formet FBI agent was lying through his teeth, and that's why he caged by adding the line about the judge. The FBI believes (as do criminals and defense attorneys) that whatever they do is legal unless they are caught, tried, and convicted -- facts in the court, not facts on the ground. And the FBI gets the privilege of being mostly free from law enforcement oversight in the first place.