4 ms·

But phone calls are not supposed to be public, and web crawlers only access items which are public, so your argument isn't valid.

by pionar 13y ago

saraid216 13y ago
> web crawlers only [supposed to] access items which are public [whether or not their author realized it] Fixed that for you.
anigbrowl 13y ago
But phone calls are not supposed to be public You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Since Smith v. Maryland (1979) the standard has been that you don't have an expectation of privacy in the records of the calls you make (as opposed to the content of those calls), on the grounds that you necessarily share that information with the phone company. This is analogous to not having any expectation of privacy on the street, eg which friends you choose to visit or which places you go that could be observed by third parties, or the lack of privacy in who mail letters to, which information is shared with the post office. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland) Now in 2006 Congress decided that consumers should have such privacy after all, and amended the telecommunications act of 1934 to make it illegal for phone companies to sell or share subscribers' call data, but that law contains a broad exception for law enforcement and intelligence gathering activity. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-109hr4709enr/pdf/BILLS-109hr4709enr.pdf http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-109hr4709enr/pdf/BILLS-10... Here's a good (non-jargon) summary of the arguments on both sides from late last year: http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/03/50935.htm http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/03/50935.htm From the legal standpoint, it's important to bear this context in mind, rather than assuming the current situation is the result of massive overreach by this administration, or the government since 9-11. The fact is that the NSA of today sits atop foundations dating from from the Cold War By chance I picked up a 70s spy novel at a thrift store the other day, and it's all about Soviet sleeper agents hidden in the US and activated by coded messages in telephone calls - the heroes are in a race against time to pinpoint the origin of the calls and interrupt the planned sequence of events. I happened to notice the book because I remembered being scared of the movie trailer as a kid since it seemed to suggest that calling the wrong number could result in a violent death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qg0w8qbBQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qg0w8qbBQo). So in the book the author was clearly worried about the openness of US society providing America's enemies with the tools of its own destruction - not unlike today's anxieties over cyber-warfare - and there's an implicit argument that high speed communications infrastructure is too powerful a force multiplier not to be under government supervision. Agree or not, it presented a surprisingly prescient understanding of asymmetrical warfare, to the point of seeming like domestic propaganda. I mention this not to justify current NRA data collection, but to offer some historical context for how the law came to be the way it is. Too often, privacy discussions on HN are pendant on mythical notions of privacy being considered sacred until very recently. Historically (and going back all the way to the country's founding) the scope of the 4th amendment has been a lot narrower than people imagine and courts have generally not given much weight to the idea of a right to privacy. The notion that the Constitution provides a right to privacy wasn't articulated by the Supreme Court until 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut (a case about birth control that paved the way for Roe v. Wade). See http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/410/410lect16.htm http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/410/410lect16.htm for a good overview. Griswold is still considered bad law by a lot of legal scholars, who think that any right to privacy needs to be added to the Constitution by amendment rather than extrapolated by judicial imagination.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Since Smith v. Maryland (1979) the standard has been that you don't have an expectation of privacy in the records of the calls you make (as opposed to the content of those calls), on the grounds that you necessarily share that information with the phone company. In the future, I hope that the legal interpretation of privacy is changed. Just because we entrust a company or individual detail of our lives does not mean we should give up all privacy interest in those details. I'd like to see a roughly similar right to privacy with regard to our transactions with commercial agents as with legal or medical agents (i.e. attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient confidentiality). In other words, employing an agent to act on our behalf should not automatically remove all privacy of that act.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    The thing is, there are excellent reasons for the current interpretation based on precedent. Although I'm quite liberal, I partly agree with conservative legal scholars that the Warren court engaged in quite a bit of legal overreach during the 60s with cases like Griswold, interpreting the Constitution so broadly that legal argument ever since has involved too much rhetorical trickery and too little straightforward explanation of the Constitution. We spend too much time on increasingly strained arguments about what the language of the Constitution means, which would be better spent on building a public consensus to amend the Constitution using clear and unambiguous language, eg inserting an explicit constitutional right to individual privacy rather than 'discovering' one in the 'penumbras' (shadows) and 'emanations' of other constitutional protections like the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. Of course the problem with rewriting the Constitution every time you have an idea for improving it is that after a while you end up with the sort of Constitution we have in California, which is less a collection of guiding principles than a heap of legislation on steroids: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/const-toc.html http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/const-toc.html At bottom, what you have is a set of conflicting imperatives. It's perfectly reasonable to charge government with the job of protecting people from military attacks, and as we saw in 2001 the costs of failure to do so can be truly severe. The opportunity costs of investing the government with broad powers to prevent such attacks are much harder to quantify. I have to say that I think the 'war on drugs' has been legally and practically far more destructive of liberty than the Patriot act or the NSA (but please don't interpret this as an endorsement of the latter). I don't worry about top-down totalitarian government nearly as much as I do about the inexorable economics of privately run prisons and city and county pension gaps. People don't care as much about the liberty of crack- and meth-heads (since drug addicts stereotypically have little consideration for others), so we craft these overbroad laws intended to protect the legitimate interests of good people by scapegoating ne'er-do-wells.

But phone calls are not supposed to be public, and web crawlers only access items which are public, so your argument isn't valid.

by pionar 13y ago

But phone calls are not supposed to be public, and web crawlers only access items which are public, so your argument isn't valid.

saraid216 13y ago

> web crawlers only [supposed to] access items which are public [whether or not their author realized it] Fixed that for you.

anigbrowl 13y ago

But phone calls are not supposed to be public You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Since Smith v. Maryland (1979) the standard has been that you don't have an expectation of privacy in the records of the calls you make (as opposed to the content of those calls), on the grounds that you necessarily share that information with the phone company. This is analogous to not having any expectation of privacy on the street, eg which friends you choose to visit or which places you go that could be observed by third parties, or the lack of privacy in who mail letters to, which information is shared with the post office. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland) Now in 2006 Congress decided that consumers should have such privacy after all, and amended the telecommunications act of 1934 to make it illegal for phone companies to sell or share subscribers' call data, but that law contains a broad exception for law enforcement and intelligence gathering activity. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-109hr4709enr/pdf/BILLS-109hr4709enr.pdf http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-109hr4709enr/pdf/BILLS-10... Here's a good (non-jargon) summary of the arguments on both sides from late last year: http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/03/50935.htm http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/03/50935.htm From the legal standpoint, it's important to bear this context in mind, rather than assuming the current situation is the result of massive overreach by this administration, or the government since 9-11. The fact is that the NSA of today sits atop foundations dating from from the Cold War By chance I picked up a 70s spy novel at a thrift store the other day, and it's all about Soviet sleeper agents hidden in the US and activated by coded messages in telephone calls - the heroes are in a race against time to pinpoint the origin of the calls and interrupt the planned sequence of events. I happened to notice the book because I remembered being scared of the movie trailer as a kid since it seemed to suggest that calling the wrong number could result in a violent death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qg0w8qbBQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qg0w8qbBQo). So in the book the author was clearly worried about the openness of US society providing America's enemies with the tools of its own destruction - not unlike today's anxieties over cyber-warfare - and there's an implicit argument that high speed communications infrastructure is too powerful a force multiplier not to be under government supervision. Agree or not, it presented a surprisingly prescient understanding of asymmetrical warfare, to the point of seeming like domestic propaganda. I mention this not to justify current NRA data collection, but to offer some historical context for how the law came to be the way it is. Too often, privacy discussions on HN are pendant on mythical notions of privacy being considered sacred until very recently. Historically (and going back all the way to the country's founding) the scope of the 4th amendment has been a lot narrower than people imagine and courts have generally not given much weight to the idea of a right to privacy. The notion that the Constitution provides a right to privacy wasn't articulated by the Supreme Court until 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut (a case about birth control that paved the way for Roe v. Wade). See http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/410/410lect16.htm http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/410/410lect16.htm for a good overview. Griswold is still considered bad law by a lot of legal scholars, who think that any right to privacy needs to be added to the Constitution by amendment rather than extrapolated by judicial imagination.

nitrogen 13y ago
Since Smith v. Maryland (1979) the standard has been that you don't have an expectation of privacy in the records of the calls you make (as opposed to the content of those calls), on the grounds that you necessarily share that information with the phone company. In the future, I hope that the legal interpretation of privacy is changed. Just because we entrust a company or individual detail of our lives does not mean we should give up all privacy interest in those details. I'd like to see a roughly similar right to privacy with regard to our transactions with commercial agents as with legal or medical agents (i.e. attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient confidentiality). In other words, employing an agent to act on our behalf should not automatically remove all privacy of that act.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  The thing is, there are excellent reasons for the current interpretation based on precedent. Although I'm quite liberal, I partly agree with conservative legal scholars that the Warren court engaged in quite a bit of legal overreach during the 60s with cases like Griswold, interpreting the Constitution so broadly that legal argument ever since has involved too much rhetorical trickery and too little straightforward explanation of the Constitution. We spend too much time on increasingly strained arguments about what the language of the Constitution means, which would be better spent on building a public consensus to amend the Constitution using clear and unambiguous language, eg inserting an explicit constitutional right to individual privacy rather than 'discovering' one in the 'penumbras' (shadows) and 'emanations' of other constitutional protections like the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. Of course the problem with rewriting the Constitution every time you have an idea for improving it is that after a while you end up with the sort of Constitution we have in California, which is less a collection of guiding principles than a heap of legislation on steroids: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/const-toc.html http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/const-toc.html At bottom, what you have is a set of conflicting imperatives. It's perfectly reasonable to charge government with the job of protecting people from military attacks, and as we saw in 2001 the costs of failure to do so can be truly severe. The opportunity costs of investing the government with broad powers to prevent such attacks are much harder to quantify. I have to say that I think the 'war on drugs' has been legally and practically far more destructive of liberty than the Patriot act or the NSA (but please don't interpret this as an endorsement of the latter). I don't worry about top-down totalitarian government nearly as much as I do about the inexorable economics of privately run prisons and city and county pension gaps. People don't care as much about the liberty of crack- and meth-heads (since drug addicts stereotypically have little consideration for others), so we craft these overbroad laws intended to protect the legitimate interests of good people by scapegoating ne'er-do-wells.