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Yahoo Email Scan Shows US Spy Push To Recast Constitutional Privacy (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Yahoo Inc's secret scanning of customer emails at the behest of a U.S. spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen constitutional protections Americans have against arbitrary governmental searches, according to legal documents and people briefed on closed court hearings. The order on Yahoo from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) last year resulted from the government's drive to change decades of interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment right of people to be secure against "unreasonable searches and seizures," intelligence officials and others familiar with the strategy told Reuters. The unifying idea, they said, is to move the focus of U.S. courts away from what makes something a distinct search and toward what is "reasonable" overall. The basis of the argument for change is that people are making much more digital data available about themselves to businesses, and that data can contain clues that would lead to authorities disrupting attacks in the United States or on U.S. interests abroad. While it might technically count as a search if an automated program trawls through all the data, the thinking goes, there is no unreasonable harm unless a human being looks at the result of that search and orders more intrusive measures or an arrest, which even then could be reasonable. Civil liberties groups and some other legal experts said the attempt to expand the ability of law enforcement agencies and intelligence services to sift through vast amounts of online data, in some cases without a court order, was in conflict with the Fourth Amendment because many innocent messages are included in the initial sweep. But the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Robert Litt, said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday that the legal interpretation needed to be adjusted because of technological changes.
"Plebs are already sharing all of this personal information with various online services anyway, why cant we just have the data they are already giving away?"
I personally enjoy my dangerous privacy/freedom over some illusion of safety at the expense of my keeping personal papers and effects to myself. To that effect, I don't use cloud services, I handle my own communications and pay a premium for privacy when its to much of a hassle to handle something on my own hardware/software.
On the other hand, my countrymen choose to trade their personal details away, and willingly track their own every move, in exchange for free email and instant communications. That is not enough of a reason to take from my choice to not willingly hand over a log of my daily activities and shopping habits, nor is it justification for my government to collect all of this data "just in case"
You want MY data? Pay for it. It is not on the barter table.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
With NSLs it doesn't matter whether they're public, private, free, or paid. The problem is the politicians who are passing abusive laws.
Yeah the Director is right. They should update the laws. TO STRENGTHEN CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS. The judges should be coming down on this shit hard. Your e-mail is exactly the same as your private mail. They couldn't open it then and they shouldn't open it now. It's not rocket science. Your communications are yours and not the governments. Is the post office allowed to read your mail? Fuck no.
AC that should have been the result of the Church Committee in the mid 1970's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... who had to look into the domestic spying role of the NSA and CIA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was the fix to allow the NSA to spy globally and to totally stop any new domestic spying issues.
Now US agencies are again looking into all email use to see if they can find some trace of a code or part of a code with no domestic oversight or protections.
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution should protect the USA domestically from any such color of law, acts, findings, security letters or any other not "legal" attempts at domestic spying.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is stupid, and I'll bother to spell it out for the peanut gallery. My college philosophy teachers liked the simple extreme examples- If you want to reduce crime, why not kill everyone? Or, to phrase it in line with the summary - "people leave clues around their homes as to what crimes they have and are likely to commit. If we allow the police to search any home at any time (or even just when temporarily vacant to lessen inconvenience for the citizen) then authorities could disrupt crime in the United States and perhaps even crime that might extent across national borders".
OF COURSE reducing privacy can also reduce crime. But so can reducing the population. Or eradicating it. People with fucked up values prioritize 'crime' over 'quality of life'. What matters most is quality of life, not crime.