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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.
If a tree falls in the forest, and the only robot that heard it only logs the metadata, does it make the parallel construction to implicate it in the 2001 World Trade Center Bombings to aid in justifying a clear-cut logging operation?
Good people go to bed earlier.
"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.
I get where you are going but the US has been into mass surveillance for so damn long with the approval of the American public it has only been a matter of time before those techniques are focused back on their own populous (I say that knowing full well that they probably already have).
I don't think there is any turning back now, it is like only finding out about the slippery slope when you are already at the bottom unfortunately. I don't think the "it is alright to spy on everyone else, just not us" permission that was given to the US government by the US people was intended to turn out like this but there you have it.
> the US has been into mass surveillance for so damn long with the approval of the American public ... I don't think there is any turning back now
I don't see public opinion forcing major changes, except possibly as part of a larger party platform, if for example the Libertarian party came to power of the next 20 years.
However, the Constitution already bars unreasonable searches, and the Supreme Court can strike down the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, without any massive political movement or cooperation from any government agency. In fact, the Southern District has already struck down the section of the Patriot Act which allows National Security Letters. The court ruled that the NSA mass phone records program was unconstitutional. That's already happened, and more decisions along those lines may be coming.
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.