Which is where the SCOTUS went off the rails on privacy and the 4th. It was a huge failure of imagination on the part of the majority. While I'm on-board with the idea that there needs to be an 'expectation of privacy', I don't think that privately contracting with a third party abrogates my rights under the 4th amendment.
Now, had the SCOTUS argued that as a quasi-public monopoly, the petitioner had already shared that information with the government and therefore had no expectation of privacy from the government the ruling would have made more sense and been a justifiable (IMO) interpretation of the 4th. (This case reached the Supreme Court in 1979 and AT&T wasn't broken up and privatized until 1984.)
What he's talking about when he says 'living and breathing' is re-interpreting the Constitution to fit contemporary fashion WITHOUT going through all the trouble to actually amend it.
Ok, I'll bite: let's say we used a constitutional convention to address our current situation. How in the world would you make the 4th amendment any clearer or more specific?
This isn't a case of differing interpretations of what the amendment means; the Federal government is completely ignoring the plain text of their ultimate controlling document. Worse, where our State and Federal representatives have not been completely compliant in this voilation, they've at best been too apathetic to raise even the most cursory objections. The Constitution isn't what needs to be fixed here.
A lot of this turns on the 'expectation of privacy.' I would argue that a reasonable person expects that her comings-and-goings are not broadly available public information and that her location information is voluntarily exchanged with a private party in exchange for location dependent services.
Or to put it another way, I think most people expect a certain level of anonymity in their daily travels. Sharing location information should be opt-in, not opt-out. You are privileged to have that information, Mr. Phone Company, because I choose to share it with you, not because you have a natural right to know it.
Much as I support the spirit of your argument, the AC is correct: "unreasonable" carries a heavy load in interpreting the 4th. Previous discussions about the 'through the wall' home scanners (I can see inside your house through the walls from the street) are instructive here.
I understand you're not trying to defend FISA and I agree that as the law is written the DoJ has a foundation for their (incorrect) beliefs. However, the 4th isn't just about your home; your house is only one of four things specifically mentioned in the 4th: your person, your house, your papers, and your effects. Privately entrusting my papers and effects to a third party doesn't (and here I'm going against past SCOTUS precedent) automatically remove my 4th amendment protections.
Moreover, while we can argue whether or not the FISA warrants meet the specificity requirements of the 4th (and I don't believe they do), they are still missing a fundamental requirement for the warrant to be valid: probable cause. It's not probable cause OR specificity, it's probable cause AND specificity.
The EFF might think they have a better chance to win on 1st amendment grounds (and a heartily disagree) but they're doing everyone a disservice by pretending violations of the 4th amendment isn't the core issue here.
+1 for Intropy. The 4th isn't difficult to understand. There are no emanations or penumbra's here; no tricksy dependent clauses:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There are no dueling interpretations of 'due process of law'; the requirements are clear: you must have probable cause, you must swear an oath on it, and you must explicitly define the things to be searched or seized.
If you're looking for wiggle room you have to find it in the definition of unreasonable; there isn't a due process of law escape clause here.
Not true, buyers do have a say because they can reject the deal. Unless you're being compelled to buy the product (say by way of a penalty, oops I mean tax) then the free market still exists and the collusion itself will eventually self destruct.
" In order to satisfy his opponents on the right..."
Do you seriously believe this? Obama's problem wasn't the Republican opposition, it was opposition within his own Democrat party! PPACA could have passed easily on straight party lines except for the fact that many Democrats were balking at passing it. The compromises he made were to satisfy his own party.
Money has nothing to do with it. Money is the symptom. Power is the problem, specifically consolidation of power at the national level. Money follows power. We've allowed way too much power to be consolidated at the national level. Every single problem we're talking about here can be traced to that.
In theory we could ameliorate the problem by returning to the original intent of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers. In practice, I see no way for that to happen since ALL of the political actors involved want further consolidation not less. For special interests, it's way more efficient to lobby the federal government rather than 50 state governments. For federal politicians, consolidating power increases their ability to sell their power off to the special interests. Rank-and-file members of team red and team blue both want more power consolidated at the federal level to better push their respective ideological agendas (both of which are rooted in the idea that the hoi polloi can't be trusted to know what's good for them).
You can continue to rail against money in politics but until you address the disease instead of the symptom you're wasting our time and your breath.
Because you want to put your corporation's data on it. It's completely reasonable for your employer to require that you take the steps necessary to protect data that they're letting you have access to.
Time to head back to school: your information about corporate IT legal liability is about 25 years out-of-date.
Who cares, you ask? Lots and lots of government regulatory agencies, especially in Western Europe. Did you fail to take the minimum standard of care to protect data deemed sensitive by your local regulatory authorities? Congratulations! Your data leak just earned the company a big fat fine or, in extreme cases, jail time!
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Who else cares? The payment industry! Good luck getting approved to take electronic payments when your answer to "How are you securing our customer's payment PII" is a blank stare and a piece of paper.
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! Do you know who else cares? Your customers! I guarantee that if they're not asking for it now, your customers will soon be asking you to demonstrate that you're taking industry standard measures to secure their confidential information. Failed to implement commercially reasonable information security? Loss of revenue! Loss of customers! Lawsuits! What fun!
Its easy to build a very competent gaming rig for less than $500. Tom's Hardware has a regular feature about how to do it. Heck the $500 gaming PC I built more than five years ago still plays modern games with high graphics with only one graphics card upgrade in that time. And I still haven't even bothered to OC the CPU.
I'm rebuilding one now that would have come in under $500 but I wanted a high efficiency totally silent PSU and so I splurged on that component, otherwise I was easily under $500.
An embryo that dies due to natural causes hasn't been murdered. Murder requires both knowledge and intent: I knew my action was going to result in death and I specifically took that action in order to cause death.
As for when life begins, conception is the logical point to choose because it is the least arbitrary. You've specified operating brain as a criteria for your definition of the start of a human life. Define operating. I'm going to assume that you mean a brain that's autonomously controlling at least some of the autonomic functions of the child but that's just an arbitrary point you picked. Is that any more or less valid than the point of recognizable self-awareness; a point which it might argued doesn't come until well after birth?
Ender's Game is a great work of fiction because of the relationships, not because of the technology (which was for the general public visionary at the time) or because of the loner hero with latent superpowers (which he didn't have). Ender became great not because he was a genius but because of the deep bonds he formed with the other students, because of the community he built up around him that was greater than the sum of its parts. The climax of the book isn't beating the final boss, it's the betrayal of one of those relationships and the fallout that defines Ender's Game.
Ender changed the Battle School through his empathy and his relationships. It's why Ender was selected and not Peter. If you missed that the first time around, it's worth re-reading the book in that context.
You mean the Executive Branch that originated the idea this time around? Or maybe you mean the one that signed it into law? Perhaps you're thinking about the Executive Branch that encouraged its allies in Congress to kill a bill that would have allowed the Executive Branch greater leeway in how the sequester was implemented.
First of all, the hidden wealth doesn't make your argument stronger, it makes it weaker. If the money hadn't been hidden the imbalance in the the amount of the total income tax paid would be even more disproportionally allocated to the rich.
Secondly, most minimum wage workers are still dependents or are supplementing their income, not trying to raise a family of four.
Finally, congratulations: at $160K annual earnings YOU are just short of being in the top 5% of all income earners in the US (starts at $186K). Your combined salaries also put you comfortably in the global 1%. You greedy scumbag, you.
So please tell us: if capital and management add no value to production, why don't the laborers just give them the boot and go into business for themselves? Think how much richer they each could be individually if they weren't paying for all that useless overhead? Maybe this is just the first time anyone has thought of it, in which case, you're welcome.
-1 Disagree. Your quoted text indicates who released the information but does not include the identity of the person or persons who leaked the information in the first place. In fact, had you only quoted one more paragraph (the one directly above your excerpt) you could have saved everyone a lot of time:
"The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ exploration of the secretive world of offshore companies and trusts began after a computer hard drive packed with corporate data and personal information and e-mails arrived in the mail."
The multimillionaire is paying nearly 10 times as much as the couple making 100K.
In what way is this retrogressive?
To play devil's advocate: why are we not penalizing the 100K couple for FAILING to make $2M and thus depriving society of an additional $175K in tax revenue! It's unfair that this couple should be able to get away with only paying $25K in taxes when they're enjoying the rich benefits of our society!
You're living in a very small world and there are very few people who live there with you. (Despite this post, I'm one of them btw.) People who live in the rest of the world, and that's almost everyone, are never going to code up a game themselves. The idea isn't even going to cross their mind. Why? Because they don't care.
They just want something that works. They own technology to accomplish a task, not for the sake of owning the technology. They want to take a picture, send an email, read a web page, or play a game and they don't care in the slightest how many Mega-pixel-fps-giga-tdp widgets 2.0 this thing has over that thing. This is why the iPad (and the iPhone) is so popular; it gets out of the way and let's people do what they want to do without having to know or care how it happens.
If the device in their hand does what they want it to do then there is no 'upgrade' (I'd argue: downgrade) path to a PC. The personal computer as you and I know it will die a much deserved death.
You care. I care. We are, however, a shrinking minority.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is where the SCOTUS went off the rails on privacy and the 4th. It was a huge failure of imagination on the part of the majority. While I'm on-board with the idea that there needs to be an 'expectation of privacy', I don't think that privately contracting with a third party abrogates my rights under the 4th amendment.
Now, had the SCOTUS argued that as a quasi-public monopoly, the petitioner had already shared that information with the government and therefore had no expectation of privacy from the government the ruling would have made more sense and been a justifiable (IMO) interpretation of the 4th. (This case reached the Supreme Court in 1979 and AT&T wasn't broken up and privatized until 1984.)
What he's talking about when he says 'living and breathing' is re-interpreting the Constitution to fit contemporary fashion WITHOUT going through all the trouble to actually amend it.
Ok, I'll bite: let's say we used a constitutional convention to address our current situation. How in the world would you make the 4th amendment any clearer or more specific?
This isn't a case of differing interpretations of what the amendment means; the Federal government is completely ignoring the plain text of their ultimate controlling document. Worse, where our State and Federal representatives have not been completely compliant in this voilation, they've at best been too apathetic to raise even the most cursory objections. The Constitution isn't what needs to be fixed here.
A lot of this turns on the 'expectation of privacy.' I would argue that a reasonable person expects that her comings-and-goings are not broadly available public information and that her location information is voluntarily exchanged with a private party in exchange for location dependent services.
Or to put it another way, I think most people expect a certain level of anonymity in their daily travels. Sharing location information should be opt-in, not opt-out. You are privileged to have that information, Mr. Phone Company, because I choose to share it with you, not because you have a natural right to know it.
Much as I support the spirit of your argument, the AC is correct: "unreasonable" carries a heavy load in interpreting the 4th. Previous discussions about the 'through the wall' home scanners (I can see inside your house through the walls from the street) are instructive here.
I understand you're not trying to defend FISA and I agree that as the law is written the DoJ has a foundation for their (incorrect) beliefs. However, the 4th isn't just about your home; your house is only one of four things specifically mentioned in the 4th: your person, your house, your papers, and your effects. Privately entrusting my papers and effects to a third party doesn't (and here I'm going against past SCOTUS precedent) automatically remove my 4th amendment protections.
Moreover, while we can argue whether or not the FISA warrants meet the specificity requirements of the 4th (and I don't believe they do), they are still missing a fundamental requirement for the warrant to be valid: probable cause. It's not probable cause OR specificity, it's probable cause AND specificity.
The EFF might think they have a better chance to win on 1st amendment grounds (and a heartily disagree) but they're doing everyone a disservice by pretending violations of the 4th amendment isn't the core issue here.
+1 for Intropy. The 4th isn't difficult to understand. There are no emanations or penumbra's here; no tricksy dependent clauses:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. "
There are no dueling interpretations of 'due process of law'; the requirements are clear: you must have probable cause, you must swear an oath on it, and you must explicitly define the things to be searched or seized.
If you're looking for wiggle room you have to find it in the definition of unreasonable; there isn't a due process of law escape clause here.
Not true, buyers do have a say because they can reject the deal. Unless you're being compelled to buy the product (say by way of a penalty, oops I mean tax) then the free market still exists and the collusion itself will eventually self destruct.
" In order to satisfy his opponents on the right ..."
Do you seriously believe this? Obama's problem wasn't the Republican opposition, it was opposition within his own Democrat party! PPACA could have passed easily on straight party lines except for the fact that many Democrats were balking at passing it. The compromises he made were to satisfy his own party.
Money has nothing to do with it. Money is the symptom. Power is the problem, specifically consolidation of power at the national level. Money follows power. We've allowed way too much power to be consolidated at the national level. Every single problem we're talking about here can be traced to that.
In theory we could ameliorate the problem by returning to the original intent of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers. In practice, I see no way for that to happen since ALL of the political actors involved want further consolidation not less. For special interests, it's way more efficient to lobby the federal government rather than 50 state governments. For federal politicians, consolidating power increases their ability to sell their power off to the special interests. Rank-and-file members of team red and team blue both want more power consolidated at the federal level to better push their respective ideological agendas (both of which are rooted in the idea that the hoi polloi can't be trusted to know what's good for them).
You can continue to rail against money in politics but until you address the disease instead of the symptom you're wasting our time and your breath.
"Why do I also have to give YOU control over it?"
Because you want to put your corporation's data on it. It's completely reasonable for your employer to require that you take the steps necessary to protect data that they're letting you have access to.
Time to head back to school: your information about corporate IT legal liability is about 25 years out-of-date.
Who cares, you ask? Lots and lots of government regulatory agencies, especially in Western Europe. Did you fail to take the minimum standard of care to protect data deemed sensitive by your local regulatory authorities? Congratulations! Your data leak just earned the company a big fat fine or, in extreme cases, jail time!
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Who else cares? The payment industry! Good luck getting approved to take electronic payments when your answer to "How are you securing our customer's payment PII" is a blank stare and a piece of paper.
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! Do you know who else cares? Your customers! I guarantee that if they're not asking for it now, your customers will soon be asking you to demonstrate that you're taking industry standard measures to secure their confidential information. Failed to implement commercially reasonable information security? Loss of revenue! Loss of customers! Lawsuits! What fun!
I notice that you don't list an MDM in your deployed applications. For email, how are you dealing with lost devices?
Its easy to build a very competent gaming rig for less than $500. Tom's Hardware has a regular feature about how to do it. Heck the $500 gaming PC I built more than five years ago still plays modern games with high graphics with only one graphics card upgrade in that time. And I still haven't even bothered to OC the CPU.
I'm rebuilding one now that would have come in under $500 but I wanted a high efficiency totally silent PSU and so I splurged on that component, otherwise I was easily under $500.
Actually they didn't. Like Microsoft 20 years later, IBM got dragged through the US's anti-trust system for years and in the end nothing happened.
+1 Best AC post of the thread. I LOL'd.
An embryo that dies due to natural causes hasn't been murdered. Murder requires both knowledge and intent: I knew my action was going to result in death and I specifically took that action in order to cause death.
As for when life begins, conception is the logical point to choose because it is the least arbitrary. You've specified operating brain as a criteria for your definition of the start of a human life. Define operating. I'm going to assume that you mean a brain that's autonomously controlling at least some of the autonomic functions of the child but that's just an arbitrary point you picked. Is that any more or less valid than the point of recognizable self-awareness; a point which it might argued doesn't come until well after birth?
**Spoiler Alerts**
Ender's Game is a great work of fiction because of the relationships, not because of the technology (which was for the general public visionary at the time) or because of the loner hero with latent superpowers (which he didn't have). Ender became great not because he was a genius but because of the deep bonds he formed with the other students, because of the community he built up around him that was greater than the sum of its parts. The climax of the book isn't beating the final boss, it's the betrayal of one of those relationships and the fallout that defines Ender's Game.
Ender changed the Battle School through his empathy and his relationships. It's why Ender was selected and not Peter. If you missed that the first time around, it's worth re-reading the book in that context.
I dunno, I got a Dyson vacuum and it really sucks.
You mean the Executive Branch that originated the idea this time around? Or maybe you mean the one that signed it into law? Perhaps you're thinking about the Executive Branch that encouraged its allies in Congress to kill a bill that would have allowed the Executive Branch greater leeway in how the sequester was implemented.
"Weasels, all of 'em."
At least we can agree on that.
First of all, the hidden wealth doesn't make your argument stronger, it makes it weaker. If the money hadn't been hidden the imbalance in the the amount of the total income tax paid would be even more disproportionally allocated to the rich.
Secondly, most minimum wage workers are still dependents or are supplementing their income, not trying to raise a family of four.
Finally, congratulations: at $160K annual earnings YOU are just short of being in the top 5% of all income earners in the US (starts at $186K). Your combined salaries also put you comfortably in the global 1%. You greedy scumbag, you.
So please tell us: if capital and management add no value to production, why don't the laborers just give them the boot and go into business for themselves? Think how much richer they each could be individually if they weren't paying for all that useless overhead? Maybe this is just the first time anyone has thought of it, in which case, you're welcome.
-1 Disagree. Your quoted text indicates who released the information but does not include the identity of the person or persons who leaked the information in the first place. In fact, had you only quoted one more paragraph (the one directly above your excerpt) you could have saved everyone a lot of time:
"The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ exploration of the secretive world of offshore companies and trusts began after a computer hard drive packed with corporate data and personal information and e-mails arrived in the mail."
25% of 100K = 25K
10% of 2M = 200K
The multimillionaire is paying nearly 10 times as much as the couple making 100K.
In what way is this retrogressive?
To play devil's advocate: why are we not penalizing the 100K couple for FAILING to make $2M and thus depriving society of an additional $175K in tax revenue! It's unfair that this couple should be able to get away with only paying $25K in taxes when they're enjoying the rich benefits of our society!
You're living in a very small world and there are very few people who live there with you. (Despite this post, I'm one of them btw.) People who live in the rest of the world, and that's almost everyone, are never going to code up a game themselves. The idea isn't even going to cross their mind. Why? Because they don't care.
They just want something that works. They own technology to accomplish a task, not for the sake of owning the technology. They want to take a picture, send an email, read a web page, or play a game and they don't care in the slightest how many Mega-pixel-fps-giga-tdp widgets 2.0 this thing has over that thing. This is why the iPad (and the iPhone) is so popular; it gets out of the way and let's people do what they want to do without having to know or care how it happens.
If the device in their hand does what they want it to do then there is no 'upgrade' (I'd argue: downgrade) path to a PC. The personal computer as you and I know it will die a much deserved death.
You care. I care. We are, however, a shrinking minority.