3 ms·

> We should not expect more privacy from law enforcement than we would from any other stranger. We should most certainly expect a greater measure of accountabi

> We should not expect more privacy from law enforcement than we would from any other stranger. We should most certainly expect a greater measure of accountability, care to rights, and due process from law enforcement than from random encounters with strangers. Random people see where you are, their cell phones make incidental record of you in their photographs and videos, but these aren't really actionable for said random person. ISPs and cellular providers have all sorts of info on you, but in theory this isn't being used for continual judgment of suspicion against you (though it wouldn't surprise me if it was). Aggregated together and accessible to law enforcement, though, becomes a greater threat to individuals due to false positives, corrupt police organizations, bad laws, suspicion via incidental association automatically eroding rights, and so on. Add to this the basic human nature in that our unthinking day to day actions and thoughts are messy, flippant, and not done with care to judgment. We need privacy to be socially healthy. I think what happened in response to the Boston marathon bombings is a reasonable model: Private cell phone footage and CCTV captures were held individually, and voluntarily offered up to law enforcement for analysis for a particular, egregious crime. In the hands of unaffiliated private parties, that information is innocuous. Aggregated, it is too powerful to not be bound by a far stricter due process. Law enforcement only had access to this because the situation warranted it, not because they had carte blanche access to everything unchecked.

xapata 10y ago
> aggregated It is unreasonable to expect a typical stranger to have access to aggregated surveillance data. Therefore, law enforcement should need a warrant to access such data. BTW, in the article, Comey is talking about what access is possible with a warrant.
- white-flame 10y ago
  Yes, Comey's words, at face value, always do come across as respecting due process. But what even is a "warrant" anymore as it applies to three letter organizations? What are the scopes of these things nowadays? And the tradeoff that Comey doesn't like and that is out of his hands is that we the people want no mechanism for any digitally remote third party to gain access to our data. In the cell phone case, we don't even want physical access to our devices to provide access to our data by others. Law enforcement's access is collateral damage in this fight, which makes warrants moot anyway. But it's either accessible or not, blind to who is doing the accessing, so closed it should be.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

xapata 10y ago

> aggregated It is unreasonable to expect a typical stranger to have access to aggregated surveillance data. Therefore, law enforcement should need a warrant to access such data. BTW, in the article, Comey is talking about what access is possible with a warrant.

white-flame 10y ago
Yes, Comey's words, at face value, always do come across as respecting due process. But what even is a "warrant" anymore as it applies to three letter organizations? What are the scopes of these things nowadays? And the tradeoff that Comey doesn't like and that is out of his hands is that we the people want no mechanism for any digitally remote third party to gain access to our data. In the cell phone case, we don't even want physical access to our devices to provide access to our data by others. Law enforcement's access is collateral damage in this fight, which makes warrants moot anyway. But it's either accessible or not, blind to who is doing the accessing, so closed it should be.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]