4 ms·

Same tortured definition: Copying(but not depriving you of it) without accessing (reading) is technically not seizing

swombat 12y ago
Right, so let's agree to a system when the government will open every letter, scan the contents, save them to a database, but not read them until after they've run some analysis and determined that your specific letter is of interest. That is precisely what they're doing here, except on a much larger scale than the post office could ever fathom. It is shocking to compare this to the past. I've just finished reading "Team of Rivals", a biography of Lincoln, and the amount of deeply sensitive stuff that these high-level politicians shared in personal letters to their loved ones and colleagues is astonishing. No politician today would ever put such stuff in writing - if it got into the wrong hands, it could cause incalculable damage to their reputations, relationships, etc. Those guys were being entirely honest in hand-written letters that were delivered days away in different states by a very rudimentary postal system. They clearly had complete trust in the sanctity of the privacy of their letters. This level of trust in the US government (or any, in fact) is pretty much unthinkable today. We (the people) have lost a lot of valuable ground here.
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  I've got bad news for you: that is happening, to some extent, already. It's part of how they caught Ulbricht. They find it far more practical to use collected metadata from addresses to identify postal traffic flows, however, and target their interception based on that.
AlyssaRowan 12y ago
Fibre taps, in splitting light, deprive you of some of it. Take that, loophole.
- rosser 12y ago
  You're not wrong, but that's the kind of hair-splitting (beam-splitting?) that the arguments promulgated by the NSA, et al, depend upon.
  - aragot 12y ago
    That's why I'm doubtful about checking "what the constitution intended". Maybe the US just needs a 28th Amendment stating new rights about the numeric world. We've gone through 2 technological revolutions since 1980, of course the constitution is outdated. For starters, clusters of data are dangerous in terms of privacy and theft, exponentially with their size. Is it allowed to have a firecracker at home? Is it allowed to have several thousand of them? Same goes for data, whether you're a corporation or a state.
mhurron 12y ago
> Copying(but not depriving you of it) without accessing (reading) is technically not seizing If that is a tortured definition, then it's the same tortured definition used here (as well as many other places) to justify music and movie piracy.
- sp332 12y ago
  It's different. It's illegal for the government to have this data, even if they bought it. I don't need a court order to be allowed to listen to some music.

Right, so let's agree to a system when the government will open every letter, scan the contents, save them to a database, but not read them until after they've run some analysis and determined that your specific letter is of interest. That is precisely what they're doing here, except on a much larger scale than the post office could ever fathom. It is shocking to compare this to the past. I've just finished reading "Team of Rivals", a biography of Lincoln, and the amount of deeply sensitive stuff that these high-level politicians shared in personal letters to their loved ones and colleagues is astonishing. No politician today would ever put such stuff in writing - if it got into the wrong hands, it could cause incalculable damage to their reputations, relationships, etc. Those guys were being entirely honest in hand-written letters that were delivered days away in different states by a very rudimentary postal system. They clearly had complete trust in the sanctity of the privacy of their letters. This level of trust in the US government (or any, in fact) is pretty much unthinkable today. We (the people) have lost a lot of valuable ground here.

AlyssaRowan 12y ago
I've got bad news for you: that is happening, to some extent, already. It's part of how they caught Ulbricht. They find it far more practical to use collected metadata from addresses to identify postal traffic flows, however, and target their interception based on that.

AlyssaRowan 12y ago

Fibre taps, in splitting light, deprive you of some of it. Take that, loophole.

rosser 12y ago
You're not wrong, but that's the kind of hair-splitting (beam-splitting?) that the arguments promulgated by the NSA, et al, depend upon.
- aragot 12y ago
  That's why I'm doubtful about checking "what the constitution intended". Maybe the US just needs a 28th Amendment stating new rights about the numeric world. We've gone through 2 technological revolutions since 1980, of course the constitution is outdated. For starters, clusters of data are dangerous in terms of privacy and theft, exponentially with their size. Is it allowed to have a firecracker at home? Is it allowed to have several thousand of them? Same goes for data, whether you're a corporation or a state.

mhurron 12y ago

> Copying(but not depriving you of it) without accessing (reading) is technically not seizing If that is a tortured definition, then it's the same tortured definition used here (as well as many other places) to justify music and movie piracy.

sp332 12y ago
It's different. It's illegal for the government to have this data, even if they bought it. I don't need a court order to be allowed to listen to some music.