4 ms·

They a good idea with "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not

They a good idea with "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." It was inconvenient so they eroded it. When it came to the black panthers they took away both the 2nd and the 4th.

shadowgovt 5y ago
The tricky part is "unreasonable." When someone's using the mail to send anthrax to people, knowing who communicated with whom to trace it to the source is suddenly very reasonable. Dying from anthrax is a lot less convenient than having record of every letter a person sent or received dry-rotting in a data warehouse somewhere.
- Teever 5y ago
  > When someone's using the mail to send anthrax to people, knowing who communicated with whom to trace it to the source is suddenly very reasonable. When someone's using the roads to travel to kill people, knowing who travelled to whom to trace them to the source is suddenly very reasonable. No wait, that's insane, we should never expect that it is reasonable to conduct mass surveillance on all the roads in the country to find out where people go all the time. Why do people think this kind of stuff is reasonable and positive for society?
  - soup10 5y ago
    Can't they already track people that way using car or phone gps?
    - kragen 5y ago
      That depends on who controls the software running on the car or phone. Determining your position via GPS does not emit any signals that can be detected; it's a purely passive process. If malicious software installed on the phone records the GPS data and later transmits it, then yes. However, cellphones in particular do require the cellphone network to track at least which cell they're in in order to work, so in practice controlling a cellphone network gives you a pretty good idea of where all the subscribers are. This is a big problem, and we need to figure out how to stop it if we are to enjoy the sort of freedom from government surveillance that people everywhere enjoyed since the Paleolithic until about 01998. The 20th-century results of giving too much power to governments are not promising.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Yes, they can. "Reasonable" changes over time, with available technology, and with the tolerance of the public. People don't much care for "We could've stopped that murder / caught that murderer, but we didn't use the resources available." If there's a murder on a street corner, do we expect the cops to not pull camera records from every nearby store with an outward-facing camera?
      - irrational 5y ago
        In my experience, cops won’t do any detective work anymore unless it directly affects them. Your house is broken into and the thieves dropped their wallet with their ID? The cops will not follow up on that and get your stuff back. Murder? Hardly.
        shadowgovt 5y ago
        Murder and theft are treated very differently (but yes, theft is under-prosecuted... The police are under-incentivized to pursue it because insurance usually makes the victim financially whole).
    - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
      Something doesn’t become a good thing just because it’s possible and/or been happening for a while.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        In general, it becomes a good thing if it helps more than it harms.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    > we should never expect that it is reasonable to conduct mass surveillance on all the roads in the country to find out where people go all the time. Utility and traffic light poles have cameras and license plate scanners that can capture up to 5000 plates/sec, even in smaller suburban areas, at an increasingly alarming rate. EZ Pass and similar are scanned in lots of places that aren't toll plazas — at least that is possibly agreed to via a terms of use.
    - Teever 5y ago
      These are facts but they don't answer the question "Why do people think this kind of stuff is reasonable and positive for society?"
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        Because it solves crimes. I was on a jury where the police were able to track down a hit and run driver who killed a teenager within about 45 minutes due to red light cameras.
        tsimionescu 5y ago
        Solving crimes is a minor bonus for society. If they had prevented the driver from killing the teen, then that would have been a much more compelling argument. But people running after a fatal crash doesn't make situation much worse, and the incentive to avoid fatal crashes doesn't change massively if you know for sure that you will be caught rather than being almost entirely sure.
        netizen-936824 5y ago
        In most of the comments about solving crime, its never about prevention but rather retribution.
        Teever 5y ago
        There are lots of things that we could do to solve crimes but we don't because of the negative effects of doing them. Torture is a good example.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Why would it be reasonable? Police and intelligence agencies already have tremendous powers and resources to figure these things out with targeted surveillance. Untargetted surveillance is many steps too far. Not to mention, a trove of communication like this is a major risk to every citizen: it can leak, it can stolen, it can be used by corrupt agents to blackmail or otherwise coerce most people, especially in the age of sexting, dick pics, etc.
- tcmart14 5y ago
  I believe Franklin said something along the lines of anyone who gives up freedom for security doesnt deserve freedom at all.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    That's an oft-misunderstood quote. The Penn family was trying to buy their way out of having their American land-holdings taxed by offering to pay mercenaries to protect the Colony (in a single lump sum). Franklin was arguing the Colony should assert its sovereign right to tax the family. The "essential liberty" in question was the liberty of a government to levy tax as it saw fit to provide for a common defence.
perl4ever 5y ago
"They decided to do something utterly illegal and censor the mail of people inside the United States - which they have no right to do. So it had to be set up very delicately as a voluntary thing. We would all volunteer not to seal the envelopes of the letters we sent out, and it would be all right for them to open letters coming in to us; that was voluntarily accepted by us. We would leave our letters open; and they would seal them if they were OK. If they weren't OK in their opinion, they would send the letter back to us with a note that there was a violation of such and such a paragraph of our "understanding." " Notice the implication that it was reasonable to censor mail going to soldiers outside the country, (in WWII) but not inside the US. "I get a letter from my wife that says, “It's very difficult writing because I feel that the _____ is looking over my shoulder." And where the word was, there is a splotch made with ink eradicator. So I went down to the bureau, and I said, “You're not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don't like it. You can look at it, but you're not supposed to take anything out." They said, “Don't be ridiculous. Do you think that's the way censors work - with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors." I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, “Did you use ink eradicator in your letter?" She writes back, “No, I didn't use ink eradicator in my letter, it must have been the____ and there's a hole cut out of the paper" "I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she said, “Well, where's all the stuff?" I said, “What stuff?" She said, “Litharge, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry.” I said, “Wait a minute - that was a list?" She said, “Yes." "That was a code", I said. "They thought it was a code - litharge, glycerine, etc."
- eddytrex_ 5y ago
  Richard Feynman
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  I feel like censoring the mail of those working on the first atomic bomb is different from intercepting the mail of civilians.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    And this is how privacy and rights erode.

shadowgovt 5y ago

The tricky part is "unreasonable." When someone's using the mail to send anthrax to people, knowing who communicated with whom to trace it to the source is suddenly very reasonable. Dying from anthrax is a lot less convenient than having record of every letter a person sent or received dry-rotting in a data warehouse somewhere.

Teever 5y ago
> When someone's using the mail to send anthrax to people, knowing who communicated with whom to trace it to the source is suddenly very reasonable. When someone's using the roads to travel to kill people, knowing who travelled to whom to trace them to the source is suddenly very reasonable. No wait, that's insane, we should never expect that it is reasonable to conduct mass surveillance on all the roads in the country to find out where people go all the time. Why do people think this kind of stuff is reasonable and positive for society?
- soup10 5y ago
  Can't they already track people that way using car or phone gps?
  - kragen 5y ago
    That depends on who controls the software running on the car or phone. Determining your position via GPS does not emit any signals that can be detected; it's a purely passive process. If malicious software installed on the phone records the GPS data and later transmits it, then yes. However, cellphones in particular do require the cellphone network to track at least which cell they're in in order to work, so in practice controlling a cellphone network gives you a pretty good idea of where all the subscribers are. This is a big problem, and we need to figure out how to stop it if we are to enjoy the sort of freedom from government surveillance that people everywhere enjoyed since the Paleolithic until about 01998. The 20th-century results of giving too much power to governments are not promising.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Yes, they can. "Reasonable" changes over time, with available technology, and with the tolerance of the public. People don't much care for "We could've stopped that murder / caught that murderer, but we didn't use the resources available." If there's a murder on a street corner, do we expect the cops to not pull camera records from every nearby store with an outward-facing camera?
    - irrational 5y ago
      In my experience, cops won’t do any detective work anymore unless it directly affects them. Your house is broken into and the thieves dropped their wallet with their ID? The cops will not follow up on that and get your stuff back. Murder? Hardly.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        Murder and theft are treated very differently (but yes, theft is under-prosecuted... The police are under-incentivized to pursue it because insurance usually makes the victim financially whole).
  - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
    Something doesn’t become a good thing just because it’s possible and/or been happening for a while.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      In general, it becomes a good thing if it helps more than it harms.
- atatatat 5y ago
  > we should never expect that it is reasonable to conduct mass surveillance on all the roads in the country to find out where people go all the time. Utility and traffic light poles have cameras and license plate scanners that can capture up to 5000 plates/sec, even in smaller suburban areas, at an increasingly alarming rate. EZ Pass and similar are scanned in lots of places that aren't toll plazas — at least that is possibly agreed to via a terms of use.
  - Teever 5y ago
    These are facts but they don't answer the question "Why do people think this kind of stuff is reasonable and positive for society?"
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Because it solves crimes. I was on a jury where the police were able to track down a hit and run driver who killed a teenager within about 45 minutes due to red light cameras.
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        Solving crimes is a minor bonus for society. If they had prevented the driver from killing the teen, then that would have been a much more compelling argument. But people running after a fatal crash doesn't make situation much worse, and the incentive to avoid fatal crashes doesn't change massively if you know for sure that you will be caught rather than being almost entirely sure.
        netizen-936824 5y ago
        In most of the comments about solving crime, its never about prevention but rather retribution.
      - Teever 5y ago
        There are lots of things that we could do to solve crimes but we don't because of the negative effects of doing them. Torture is a good example.
tsimionescu 5y ago
Why would it be reasonable? Police and intelligence agencies already have tremendous powers and resources to figure these things out with targeted surveillance. Untargetted surveillance is many steps too far. Not to mention, a trove of communication like this is a major risk to every citizen: it can leak, it can stolen, it can be used by corrupt agents to blackmail or otherwise coerce most people, especially in the age of sexting, dick pics, etc.
tcmart14 5y ago
I believe Franklin said something along the lines of anyone who gives up freedom for security doesnt deserve freedom at all.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  That's an oft-misunderstood quote. The Penn family was trying to buy their way out of having their American land-holdings taxed by offering to pay mercenaries to protect the Colony (in a single lump sum). Franklin was arguing the Colony should assert its sovereign right to tax the family. The "essential liberty" in question was the liberty of a government to levy tax as it saw fit to provide for a common defence.

perl4ever 5y ago

"They decided to do something utterly illegal and censor the mail of people inside the United States - which they have no right to do. So it had to be set up very delicately as a voluntary thing. We would all volunteer not to seal the envelopes of the letters we sent out, and it would be all right for them to open letters coming in to us; that was voluntarily accepted by us. We would leave our letters open; and they would seal them if they were OK. If they weren't OK in their opinion, they would send the letter back to us with a note that there was a violation of such and such a paragraph of our "understanding." " Notice the implication that it was reasonable to censor mail going to soldiers outside the country, (in WWII) but not inside the US. "I get a letter from my wife that says, “It's very difficult writing because I feel that the _____ is looking over my shoulder." And where the word was, there is a splotch made with ink eradicator. So I went down to the bureau, and I said, “You're not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don't like it. You can look at it, but you're not supposed to take anything out." They said, “Don't be ridiculous. Do you think that's the way censors work - with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors." I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, “Did you use ink eradicator in your letter?" She writes back, “No, I didn't use ink eradicator in my letter, it must have been the____ and there's a hole cut out of the paper" "I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she said, “Well, where's all the stuff?" I said, “What stuff?" She said, “Litharge, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry.” I said, “Wait a minute - that was a list?" She said, “Yes." "That was a code", I said. "They thought it was a code - litharge, glycerine, etc."

eddytrex_ 5y ago
Richard Feynman
bobsmooth 5y ago
I feel like censoring the mail of those working on the first atomic bomb is different from intercepting the mail of civilians.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  And this is how privacy and rights erode.