At the risk of playing messenger and getting shot, I'll say this: I think what rayiner's trying to do is clarify the narrative. Right now the dominant narrative

At the risk of playing messenger and getting shot, I'll say this: I think what rayiner's trying to do is clarify the narrative. Right now the dominant narrative on HN seems to be "the government has expanded their powers to intrude on our right to privacy." Rayiner is suggesting that perhaps the government is simply exercising the power it had been granted over years of precedent-setting court decisions (including, critically, the loss of expectation of privacy when information is handed to a third party). According to this alternate narrative, what has changed hasn't really been the government's scope of power, but rather our increasing reliance on third-party services to mediate our interactions in the modern world. As more and more of our communication is digitized and aggregated by third party services, more of our information falls within the government's constitutionally limited scope. A key point of contention is whether what we're seeing here is the government breaking laws, or the government following laws that simply haven't caught up with the times. Rayiner believes (I think) that it's the latter, and therefore has reason for optimism; as he says, "I think those laws [to protect electronic communications] could work because I don't believe the government is just ignoring the law."