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Using Fourth-Party Data Brokers To Bypass the Fourth Amendment
An anonymous reader writes "Coming out of Columbia Law School is an article about commercial data brokers and their ability to provide information about individuals to the US government despite Fourth Amendment or statutory protections (abstract, full PDF at Download link). Quoting: 'The Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect information that has been voluntarily disclosed to a third-party or obtained by means of a private search. Congress reacted to these holdings by creating a patchwork of statutes designed to prevent the government's direct and unfettered access to documents stored with third-parties; thus, the government's access is fettered by various statutory requirements, including, in many cases, notice of the disclosure. Despite these protections, however, third-parties are not restricted from passing the same data to other private companies (fourth-parties), and after the events of September 11, 2001, the government, believing that it needed a greater scope of surveillance, turned to the fourth-parties to access the personal information it could not acquire on its own. As a consequence, the fourth-parties, unrestricted by Fourth Amendment or statutory concerns, delivered — and continue to deliver — personal data en masse to the government.'"
In a state of nature...
It has something to do with figuring out how many representatives your area should have in government, because you give up your freedom to make your own laws to him.
It has something to do with figuring out how many police officers, firefighters, and paramedics your area needs in order to provide sufficient coverage, because you give up your freedom to kill the man who raped your daughter, burn down your old house, and have that cancer looked at by the spiritual surgeon.
It has something to do with figuring out if the school you went to is providing a good education because you're giving up your freedom to not have your child educated in a manner that is not agreed upon by your representatives.
It has something to do with figuring out if you are owed veteran benefits if you were in the military and deployed because you're giving someone else the right to protect yourself from all enemies, foreign and domestic
It has something to do with making sure that the various utilities are sufficient for your area, so that you don't have blackouts all the time, because you give up your right to your own land.
It has to do with things that could possibly be good. The only reason the government could possibly have for compiling information about you is because it wants to limit your freedom, because that really is the only purpose of government.
What the original poster didn't say, is that life without governance kind of sucks.
but no government is far, far worse
the idea is to improve upon failures, not negate the whole entity. to criticize the very existence of government rather than why government needs improvement is a hard fail on your part
government is a necessarily evil, but completely necessary
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it