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> Neither privacy abuse nor cops lawlessness are "young". Agreed, but I was trying to comment about digital privacy which is a fairly new issue. > constitutio

> Neither privacy abuse nor cops lawlessness are "young". Agreed, but I was trying to comment about digital privacy which is a fairly new issue. > constitutional amendment would allow for a general principle. US laws really do not. That's pretty much my point. We already have a similar amendment (the fourth amendment) already officially ratified, so this is not unprecedented. The problem with the fourth amendment is that it was written in a time when the government would need to physically go somewhere and take something, so there is no general principle allotted for digital privacy. At the same time, there _are_ laws governing ownership of data which made sense when it was the credit reporting agencies trading information for legitimate business purposes, but now we are in a very different landscape of what information can be stored, traded, transmitted, sold at a scale never before seen. These laws would need to be revised and would need the heft of a constitutional amendment to drive that process.

creer 3y ago
That's fair - and anyway nowadays even the interpretation of the constitution has never been more open. A problem with laws is that there are so many to choose from and they are so narrow. See for example the video rental records law. An extremely narrow law that ignores the broader issue entirely (and which penalty is not even scaled for inflation). Same for credit reporting. Or for HIPAA. General principle is needed and we are not likely to get that from laws. And in the US that's not what laws are for. Generally. So the 4th amendment could be touched up to correct the fact that it was written when "online", "data", computers did not exist - and metadata was thin enough to not matter too much, and "privacy" was or was not the point and was unclear of a concept. Fixing the 4th would establish the principle that yes, now digital matters and privacy matters and must be included in the 4th. Otherwise we remain in the situation where it's easy to argue that it's not part of the 4th.

creer 3y ago

That's fair - and anyway nowadays even the interpretation of the constitution has never been more open. A problem with laws is that there are so many to choose from and they are so narrow. See for example the video rental records law. An extremely narrow law that ignores the broader issue entirely (and which penalty is not even scaled for inflation). Same for credit reporting. Or for HIPAA. General principle is needed and we are not likely to get that from laws. And in the US that's not what laws are for. Generally. So the 4th amendment could be touched up to correct the fact that it was written when "online", "data", computers did not exist - and metadata was thin enough to not matter too much, and "privacy" was or was not the point and was unclear of a concept. Fixing the 4th would establish the principle that yes, now digital matters and privacy matters and must be included in the 4th. Otherwise we remain in the situation where it's easy to argue that it's not part of the 4th.