12 ms·

I wish we would treat cyberspace analogues of established property with the same respect given to the original. For example, your e-mail inbox is the online eq

• woah 14y ago
  There is nothing about monitoring our email that is necessary for security. The war on terror is a giant hoax, more people are killed every year choking on peanut butter. Members of the government are always reaching for more and more control over our lives and power to watch us.
  • mikeash 14y ago
    Do you have a cite for the peanut butter thing? I'd love to use that figure, but would hate to be unable to back it up if asked.
    • mtgx 14y ago
      I don't know about the peanut one, but you can find plenty others. Like more people die because of alcohol every year, or one that I read recently that more veterans commit suicide every year than die in the wars, etc.
    • w1ntermute 14y ago
      Another good one is the number of people that die in car accidents in the US every year, largely due to human error - 32,367 people in 2011. If the government took one tenth of the money it spends on defense every year (which was $1.030–$1.415 trillion for 2012), or approximately $100 billion dollars, and invested it in driverless car research and the infrastructure changes necessary for it, a much bigger benefit could be wrought. But that won't happen, because it's the lobbying of the military-industrial complex that determines where money is spent.
      • mikeash 14y ago
        I use that one a lot. Roughly one 9/11 every month, continually, and nobody really cares.
        • jwoah12 14y ago
          It isn't that nobody cares. It's that people see (however irrationally) car accidents as an unpreventable occurrence, while they see terrorism as something that can be stopped if we go and kill the bad guys that are doing it.
        • pjbrunet 14y ago
          If you want to play that game, nothing beats abortion deaths. http://www.numberofabortions.com/ http://www.numberofabortions.com/
          • mikeash 14y ago
            Please take your disingenuous politicking elsewhere.
          • driverdan 14y ago
            Play what game? Abortion has nothing to do with what is being discussed.
      • monochromatic 14y ago
        military-industrial complex Most of what you said is true enough, but this nonsense loses you credibility. It's like saying "it's the corporations, man."
    • rcsorensen 14y ago
      The best source I can find is http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meredith-broussard/food-allergy-deaths-less_b_151462.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meredith-broussard/food-allerg... . A call to the CDC press office revealed that the number of deaths from food allergies, as collected from 2.5 million death certificates across the country, is miniscule. Only eleven people died from food allergies in 2005, the last year for which we have data available. More people died from lawnmower accidents.
  • gnaritas 14y ago
    Not that I disagree entirely, but looking at deaths prevented isn't really relevant. Terrorism isn't about death, it's about terror, putting people in a state of fear. The war on terror isn't about preventing death, it's about preventing fear. People aren't afraid of choking on peanut butter or car accidents because they feel they have some control over those situations. Terrorism creates fear by removing that sense of control.
    • polshaw 14y ago
      >The war on terror is... about preventing fear. Many people would argue exactly the opposite
      • gnaritas 14y ago
        You can argue the opposite of anything, and many do; doesn't mean anything. 911 for example, caused the fear, which then was used to pass draconian laws, but those laws were meant to both seize power and alleviate the fear, to the point of implementing things like the TSA, which aren't real protection, but make people feel less fear.
        • mhurron 14y ago
          Other than the government with it's war on terror, who has actually done anything to perpetrate fear in the population? Since 2001, there has been no terrorist activity against the US. You are told about threats the war on terror has dealt with, but no actual action or actors can be pointed to yet the government is keeps the fear of terror alive. They have done far more to that end than any terrorist organization has. This causes the population in general to accept any course of action that they are told will deal with that looming threat, but it never seems to do so. Once side of the government generates and keeps the fear alive, the other side uses the fear to do what they wish. Neither side wants the fear to go away. The US Government is the largest group terrorizing the US population today. They use the war on terror to do it.
          • gnaritas 14y ago
  • tsotha 14y ago
    >The war on terror is a giant hoax, more people are killed every year choking on peanut butter. The fact that the Islamists don't kill millions every year doesn't make it a "giant hoax". The fact that they haven't killed more isn't due to a lack of motivation, only to a lack of means. And they've been reaching for the means.
    • Hikari 14y ago
      wtf would do you know about it ? if you have nothing to back up your claims then it might be better to just keep it quit.
      • tsotha 14y ago
        I know documentation was found in Afghanistan outlining attempts to acquire sarin gas for use in a terrorist attack in the US. On the other hand, maybe it was all faked, right, like the WTC attack? Maybe you should keep it "quit" yourself. And while you're keeping it "quit", take an English class. I would advise keeping it "quit" during the class so the teacher doesn't realize you're not the sharpest tooth on the saw.
        • Hikari 14y ago
          sorry for that I have been too busy learning Chinese, french Italian and Spanish. can't have it all.
          • tsotha 14y ago
            Maybe you should try to learn one of them well.
• FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  I find it interesting that the treatment of the digital analogue in legislation is contradictory. While it's beneficial to the government and businesses to remove the distinction between digital and physical when it comes to IP and copyright, it's just as beneficial to maintain that distinction for 'security' or 'anti-terrorism'. 'Modern' legislation doesn't feel all that progressive when it comes to technology.
• rayiner 14y ago
  So the rights with respect to your mailbox derive from the fact that the Post Office was historically an appendage of the government. Giving your personal information to a government-run Post Office versus giving it to a third party like Google (that mines your personal information for advertisements!) is a salient distinction.
  • stephengillie 14y ago
    My question still is: why can't a judge subpoena all mail you have within the Post Office's sorting system? Don't say it's due to prohibitive expense unless you can prove this would be more expensive than Carpathia hosting Megaupload for free.
    • rayiner 14y ago
      I think you drew the opposite inference from what I intended. Postal mail is more protected because the Post Office is (was) an organ of the government. As an organ of the government, it is restricted by the 4th amendment as to what it can do with your mail. E-mail is different because the intermediaries are non-governmental third parties. The idea is that you do not give up your expectation of privacy by giving mail to the Post Office to deliver, because you know the Post Office is limited by the 4th amendment, while you do give up your expectation of privacy by giving mail to your e-mail provider, because you know your e-mail provider has no obligation to protect your privacy.
• shawn-butler 14y ago
  The Sixth Disctrict court of appeals did address this directly in US v Warshak [0]. What this scare article does a good job of is confusing the reader. Unopened email left on a 3rd party server for longer than 180 days was considered discarded or abandoned property. Discarded physical property has never retained a reasonable expectation of privacy (for instance, the police are free to dumpster dive once your property is considered discarded). Similarly when you vacate an apartment and leave all your belongings behind, they become the property of the landlord. These are firmly established principles of common law. The waters become more grey when you are not using the 3rd party for communication but for storage, say for emails you have read and leave on the server for 180+ days. [1] So in this case Congress wanted to establish a new right to privacy that required a warrant on rather vague and nebulous grounds. It was dropped and so the status quo remains. All the people here complaining apparently have no idea what the law of the land currently is? Email communications residing on a third-party server for less than 180 days that offers services to the public can not be obtained without a warrant. Notification of the issuance of a warrant could be delayed by 90 days. This does not apply to 3rd party services that do not offer services to the public. They can voluntarily disclose content at their whim. If you believe my understanding to be flawed I welcome the opportunity to be corrected. [0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-victory-appeals-court-holds https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-vict... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act#Overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act#Overv...
  • paulsutter 14y ago
    Anything we can do to proactively claim or declare our emails older than 180 days to be not discarded and not abandoned? Or move them to a new server periodically so that they aren't stored in a server for more than 180 days? From Wikipedia [1]: "Property is generally deemed to have been abandoned if it is found in a place where the true owner likely intended to leave it, but is in such a condition that it is apparent that he or she has no intention of returning to claim it." I'm winging it here, but Gmail could have an optional feature to prompt every three months "do you claim your mail from January 2005 to December 2012?", and just answer yes every time. Then Google could respond to be subpoena that the user has no mail that has not been claimed in 180 days. Any lawyers here who can come up with something more solid? [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost,_mislaid,_and_abandoned_property http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost,_mislaid,_and_abandoned_... (Be nice if you had some contact info on your profile)
• chacham15 14y ago
  The common analogy given from law academics is that email is more akin to the telegram than postal mail. With postal mail, no one along the entire path actually opens the envelope to see what is inside. This is in contrast to the telegram where the intermediary is exposed to the contents directly. This difference is what leads to the difference in expectation of privacy. In this analogy email is actually more like a telegram. Where I think that the analogy diverges with reality is that the intermediary is now a machine, not a person. Therefore, we expect the machine to not "understand" the data that passes through it and simply deliver it.
  • ams6110 14y ago
    And then, using GPG or S/MIME would restore email to the status of a postal letter, with the message contained in an envelope of privacy. So if I GPG my email, that should confer a higher expectation of privacy than "normal" email would.