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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.'"
This is something that has had me puzzled for quite a while now. Why does the US have this fetish with keeping the government out of their private lives, yet allow corporations free reign to use, misuse, misplace and basically be asses with the same information?
In e.g. Norway all sectors are under the same law, this including corporate, governmental and academic uses. Obviously certain organizations are allowed to store more information than others.
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This demonstrates a remarkable failure to understand the article.
The SCOTUS ruled that Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches and seizures doesn't extend to where you voluntarily disclosed the information to a third party. In response to these rulings, Congress passed a statute to prevent the government from overreaching. It appears to have a loophole, and I'm sure in time Congress will fix it.
It's going to be concerned about stuff like this, but making unsubstantiated complaints about veiled illegitimacy is completely counterproductive.
That's funny but at face value sounds unrealistic, the parent already said government is *us* so anything the government does is a reflection of our own will. Of course that's a lie, the government don't listen to the public anymore.
I don't claim to understand the problem or to know the solution. it is vast. I'll talk about Mexican politics but I guess its roughly the same in the US. My representative said during his campaign that he wold work to lower taxes. And the very next thing he did was rise them. Now I didn't vote for him but the people that did, did so because of his campaign promises, I assume so how could he betray his word so easily? We need a mechanism to punish politicians for betraying their people but what can we do?
During our last presidential election fraud a massive pacifist protest was launched to have every vote counted because thousands of votes from the poorest regions of the country were omitted from them count for no sane reason. The protest was huge and lasted for over a month. It didn't work.
Are we supposed to start a violent revolution (again)? But carrying weapons is illegal and even if it was legal using them is not, planing on using them is not. That's the very definition of thought crime but the same is true in the States. Just planning a coup d'etat is already illegal. Only way to accomplish this is keeping it secret and small ensuring failure. Even that is impossible to carry because the government spies on the population and the population has bought on the idea that it's ok for the law to access all private information it claims to need in the name of protecting us.
Worse yet, violent uprising *is* a crime so they wouldn't be even transgressing the law which they do regularly anyway.
Do we have any realistic (effective) options to punish politicians for not keeping their promises?
But... the future refused to change.