With a big stick. Namely, if they don't show up then the court will enter a default judgment and seize any assets that can be found in the US. If those aren't enough, the US court will ask the Canadian courts to enforce the default judgment. Most countries have treaties regarding the enforcement of judgments (I don't know if Canada-US do, but I'd assume) and so the Canadian mounties will then start seizing assets in Canada and delivering them to the US embassy.
Edit -- I'm sorry, in Asahi, the Court went the other way (it wasn't fair to bring that particular manufacturer into a US court), but the general rule still stands that if you know and intend a result in another country then you are liable in that country's courts.
No, the US court really does have jurisdiction. Again, read Asahi Metals. The Supreme Court found that US courts had jurisdiction over a Japanese parts manufacturer. The parts manufacturer had never entered the US and had never even directly shipped to the US. It was enough that the parts manufacturer knew that another company was integrating its parts (tire valves) into products that were going to the US (tires).
The same goes for state-to-state conduct. If you intend that an effect be felt in another state, that state has jurisdiction over you even if you never set foot in it. Libel laws are the classic example: If I intend to libel you, a resident of New York, by calling the New York Times and giving them false information then the New York courts have jurisdiction over me even if I've never been to New York.
Here, the scammers clearly knew that their scam was going to the US (they put US labels on the envelopes) and even intended that their scam go to the US.
You can't get around laws by sitting right outside the border and mailing the evidence into the country. If the relevant part of the conduct (false bills being received) happens in a country, then that country has jurisdiction. The only question is whether the scammers get another crack at the justice system when the US asks Canada to enforce the judgment by seizing assets. That depends on Canadian law.
Au contraire. If the Canadian companies are scamming US companies by using the US postal service, you can bet that the court has jurisdiction to order them to stop.
If they don't stop, they will be in contempt. Any assets that ever enter the US can be seized. And I suspect that Canada would be more than happy to enforce the contempt judgment.
Because the targets of the scam are in the US and the US mail is being used, the court has all the jurisdiction it needs. To check this, see the Supreme Court's decision in Asahi Metal Industries Co. (1987), holding that a foreign product manufacturer could be dragged into US court if it foresaw that its products would be used in the US. This case is even stronger -- the Canadian scammers intended their scam to reach the US.
Push movie downloads into the channels that were made for yesterday's AV distribution, namely cable and satellites.
Last time I checked, most content providers weren't trying to encourage downloading of full-resolution movies. In fact, it seems that the phenomenon of movies being downloaded over the Internet far predates iTunes and can be blamed largely on people who go out of their way to illegally download movies. People want movies over the Internet, without any official encouragement. If it's not Pirate Bay or iTunes then it's indie movies on AtomFilms or YouTube. I don't see any encouragement from Microsoft being the key factor here.
Tennis -- Not really, because if you cheat further over on your backhand they'll hit it to your forehand.
Lanes -- Ideally, you calibrate the percentages to relate to the damage that can be done. For example, do 50% of parking lot sweeps in the parking lot right next to the terminal (lots of damage potential), but only 30% in the next lot and 20% in the economy lot. Sure, the easiest path for a criminal would be to attack the economy lot, but they're going to do a lot less damage. Ideally, even knowing the scan frequencies, they should throw their hands up in the air and say "there's no way to win; the cops have the good targets heavily covered and all that's left are lower-value targets."
So it's not really random... A pattern must come out after a while.
Not at all. A "pattern" that's useful to a criminal would be knowing that there's always a checkpoint on Lane 1 on Mondays, or that they always check Lane 4, then Lane 2, then Lane 1, then Lane 3.
Using the probabilities means that at any given moment there's a 20% chance they'll be checking Lane 1 and a 30% chance they'll be checking Lane 2, but it doesn't tell you whether you should try to smuggle contraband through 1 or 2.
It's basically ideal game theory -- even if the other side knows what your algorithm is, they can't beat it since you're still playing randomly. The usual Computer Science example is a tennis player; you know there's a 60% chance that your opponent will hit it to your backhand and a 40% chance that they'll hit it to your forehand, but there's a limit to how far you can compensate either direction. Knowing the probability in that case doesn't tell you which side the ball is going to go to. (The real example is somewhat more convoluted, but you get the 10-second version)
You mean the import/export clause: No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports...
The terms "import" and "export" in the Constitution refer to imports and exports from other countries. See the treatise here: "Only articles imported from or exported to a foreign country, or âoea place over which the Constitution has not extended its commands with respect to imports and their taxation,â are comprehended by the terms âoeimportsâ and âoeexports."
Clause 5. No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.... This prohibition applies only to the imposition of duties on goods by reason of exportation. The word âoeexportâ signifies goods exported to a foreign country, not to an unincorporated territory of the United States. A general tax laid on all property alike, including that intended for export, is not within the prohibition, if it is not levied on goods in course of exportation nor because of their intended exportation.
With the grant of absolute power over foreign commerce given to the federal government, the states whose economies relied chiefly on exports realized that any tax laid by the new central government upon a single item of export would apply very unevenly amongst all the states and favor states which did not export that good.
For the purpose of this clause, "export" means really "export"--as in, export to another country.
The dormant commerce clause doesn't apply because New York can regulate goods used in New York. See my comment above.
Not so fast: You're right that thanks to the "dormant commerce clause," New York can't burden out-of-state commerce or commerce that just passes right through New York without stopping. For example, New York can't tax goods that pass through New York on their way from Maine to Florida on I-95, nor commerce that happens in other states.
But, almost every state that has a sales tax also has an excise tax for people who import goods from out of state. For example, in most states if you import a car into the state then you pay the sales tax on the car even if you bought it in a state with no sales tax.
New York can very constitutionally tax goods that are used in New York. And it can reach Amazon to enforce it because Amazon has "purposefully availed" itself of the New York market by advertising there and shipping orders there. See the case Asahi Metal.
But is the school the best place for that? I agree that the school has all the kids under one roof, but parents need to step up too. It cuts both ways.
There's nothing inherently private about posting on the open Internet. If anything, Facebook provides at least a plausible privacy shield against employers finding embarrassing photos: Don't join networks and set your privacy settings high. Something on the open Internet is out there for Google to find and the world to know. Of course you could robots.txt, but then you lose the "personal brand" aspect above. Or you could give out usernames/passwords to your friends, but that's a giant pain and doesn't scale well. There are some benefits.
But if the service wouldn't have existed at all but-for the commercial use?
Do you think Google could support 5 gig of storage for every Gmail account if it couldn't target ads? That's an indirect synergistic effect -- a service that wouldn't exist but-for creative commercialization.
And would Amazon be half as useful if it didn't provide the "users who viewed this product also bought ___" feature? That's a direct synergistic effect -- a service that is made more useful by creative commercialization.
I'm not saying every use of data by Facebook is great. They've gone way too far sometimes. But there's no inherent reason why, done RIGHT, commercial use of data can't make the service better. The ground rules still stand---each commercial use must not cause harm, nor may the aggregate---but if we assume that it's done right there's no reason why there must be tension between commercial and private. I want to use the best possible Facebook/MySpace/LiveJournal/etc service and I don't care if Zuckerberg makes a million or two in the process, so long as he doesn't do so by harming me.
The thing about Facebook is that it only knows the information you tell it. If you want to shape your "personal brand" (to use the author's term) on Facebook so you appear to be a sophisticated scholar of the finer things in life, then you're free to do so. Similarly, you're free to make yourself appear to be a slacker, an emo kid, an anarchist, or whatever other image you can come up with.
The commercialization is to some degree inevitable--after all, it's unlikely that Facebook would have ever been launched but for the hopes of striking it rich--but as long as the data is limited to what YOU provide then it's hard to complain about Facebook doing exactly what it promised it would do (namely, using that data to support the servers, coders, tech support, etc).
I don't see why it has to be zero-sum. The author suggests that we need to avoid the personal value of the data being "eclipsed" by the commercial data, but they seem totally synergistic: If Facebook can afford to hire more coders to come up with more innovative new ways to connect to each other, then it doesn't matter to me if they make more use of my data for commercial purposes, so long as EACH commercial use is not harmful. This is like the debate over ad targeting all over again -- a lot of people prefer targeted ads ("commercial value") over broadcast ads because sites can recoup their costs with fewer and less intrusive targeted ads, and targeted ads are far less annoying than the v--gra sp-m that we all get by email.
In sum -- there's no reason why commercial and personal uses are in opposition to each other. If each commercial use is not harmful (i.e., my data isn't revealed or mis used) then it supports the personal use. Synergy, not parasitism.
Except none of that is true. It'd be nice for defendants if it were, but the privilege against self-incrimination does not apply to physical evidence. The Supreme Court has never held there to be a self-incrimination right against giving PHYSICAL evidence -- just to forced TESTIMONY (getting up on the stand and actually describing what happened).
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from forcing you to participate in a lineup.
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from requesting a handwriting sample or a fingerprint.
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from requesting a voice sample.
See, eg here ("It is long settled law that fingerprinting does not violate the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against compelled self-incrimination or the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Indeed, much non-testimonial evidence does not fall under those constitutional protections, including the analysis of blood and breath for alcohol. Samples of semen, hair, and other tissues may be taken without a suspect's consent.").
See also Schember v. California, where the Supreme Court reiterated that the 5th Amendment protects against compelled testimony primarily in the spoken word sense. Blood tests weren't compelled "testimony," even if they were "compelled" in the sense that they were forcible, over protests.
We can write laws that prohibit forced fingerprints, or forced handwriting samples -- call your Congressperson and tell them to do so if that's what you believe. But there's no right in the Constitution about that.
Less mind control, more evidence of past crimes. Imagine if the government got to hook up a dream machine to see if you dreamed about committing that unsolved crime.
It's an interesting 5th Amendment argument that your dreams would be giving testimony against yourself. Our technology is SO far beyond what the Founding Fathers could ever dream of that we're in uncharted waters.
It'd be nice to think that there was a golden age of air travel when nobody wanted to use aircraft as political weapons, but that only existed prior to the 1960s when air travel became affordable for the masses. There is NO period in time when airline travel was not subject to some kind of danger. Planes have always been targeted by hijackers and bombers because it's a strong political symbol that is guaranteed to generate news coverage.
For the record, metal detectors and security screening at airports started long before 9/11, and dangers to air travel started long before then as well.
In 1976, Cubana 455, with 73 people on board, was brought down by a bomb.
In 1985, Air India Flight 182, with 329 people on board, was brought down by a bomb.
In 1988, Pam-Am Flight 103, with 259 people on board, was brought down by a bomb.
In 2000, Ahmed Ressam pleaded guilty to trying to bomb Los Angeles International airport.
May I also remind you that, just in the year 1970, there were at least 13 attempted hijackings JUST TO CUBA:
* February 16 * March 11 * April 22 * May 25 * July 1 * August 2 * August 19 * August 20 * September 19 * October 30 * November 1 * November 13 * December 19
And, even after 9/11, idiots have tried to bring down commercial aircraft with bombs. They just happen to have been royally incompetent.
If you've ever gone through LHR, what I believe is still the busiest connection hub in the world, you still have to throw away all of your liquids and go through a MORE intense screening procedure than in the United States. And that's just to connect from one flight to another; in most cases in the US you don't have to be re-screened between flights!
That doesn't make Heathrow's policies right, but anybody connecting through there is just as likely to say "those crazy Brits" as "those crazy Americans."
This seems to take the concerns that people have about Google's aggregation of your data to a whole new level. Now they know not only what YOU like, but who your friends are and what THEY like too. It wouldn't be hard to make a map of the socialists, anarchists, anti-corporatists, etc, and then round them all up when there's a crime. I'm not saying that our society is anywhere near that level, but it seems to create a big risk of guilt-by-association.
Not really -- if you used a typewriter a physical letter on company letterhead and sent it inter-office then it'd be just as discoverable in litigation as an email. The question here isn't who "owns" the document, it's whether a party to litigation can get access to it. Your employer is likely going to try to protect your privacy by preventing the document from being discovered.
It's not a question of ownership at all, it's a question of access and the discovery process in litigation. The whole point of discovery is that Party A gets to go through Party B's files. For the purposes of discovery, it doesn't matter much who owns the contents of Party B's files, it just matters that Party B is holding them right now and they might (emphasis on "might") contain something relevant to the litigation.
You can argue until you're blue in the face about whether that's a good or bad arrangement, but it's a long-standing part of our civil litigation system. Plaintiffs who have been wronged think it's important to find the "smoking gun" email in company records, and there's no way to do that without going through all of the files. Companies often think that plaintiffs are just going on a "fishing expedition" by searching through documents until they find something that looks incriminating when taken out of context. And employees feel like their privacy is being violated when a third-party gets to read their email. There are a lot of moving parts here.
To be more precise, the problem is that the company you work for wants to read your email. The problem reference in TFA is that somebody else wants to read your email. The usual scenario is that somebody is suing the company you work for and has demanded all the company's email as part of discovery; your employer is going to fight hard to stop your email from being disclosed, but the other side might still get it.
So it's not a Big Brother problem in the sense that your own boss is watching you, it's a Big Uncle problem in that some plaintiff some number of years down the road gets to read all of the company's email as part of their lawsuit. Then they might take something you say casually in email--"man, big party last night, I'll be Jimbo's out of it today"--and use it as proof that Jimbo was acting negligently the next day.
Your privacy in the emails you send gets lost somewhere along the way. In theory, only the lawyers see the emails, but we all know that every single Enron email got posted to the Internet, which included a lot of personal stuff that has nothing to do with the sins of the bigwigs there.
Slashdot Mirror
With a big stick. Namely, if they don't show up then the court will enter a default judgment and seize any assets that can be found in the US. If those aren't enough, the US court will ask the Canadian courts to enforce the default judgment. Most countries have treaties regarding the enforcement of judgments (I don't know if Canada-US do, but I'd assume) and so the Canadian mounties will then start seizing assets in Canada and delivering them to the US embassy.
Edit -- I'm sorry, in Asahi, the Court went the other way (it wasn't fair to bring that particular manufacturer into a US court), but the general rule still stands that if you know and intend a result in another country then you are liable in that country's courts.
The court CLEARLY doesn't have jurisdiction.
No, the US court really does have jurisdiction. Again, read Asahi Metals. The Supreme Court found that US courts had jurisdiction over a Japanese parts manufacturer. The parts manufacturer had never entered the US and had never even directly shipped to the US. It was enough that the parts manufacturer knew that another company was integrating its parts (tire valves) into products that were going to the US (tires).
The same goes for state-to-state conduct. If you intend that an effect be felt in another state, that state has jurisdiction over you even if you never set foot in it. Libel laws are the classic example: If I intend to libel you, a resident of New York, by calling the New York Times and giving them false information then the New York courts have jurisdiction over me even if I've never been to New York.
Here, the scammers clearly knew that their scam was going to the US (they put US labels on the envelopes) and even intended that their scam go to the US.
You can't get around laws by sitting right outside the border and mailing the evidence into the country. If the relevant part of the conduct (false bills being received) happens in a country, then that country has jurisdiction. The only question is whether the scammers get another crack at the justice system when the US asks Canada to enforce the judgment by seizing assets. That depends on Canadian law.
Au contraire. If the Canadian companies are scamming US companies by using the US postal service, you can bet that the court has jurisdiction to order them to stop.
If they don't stop, they will be in contempt. Any assets that ever enter the US can be seized. And I suspect that Canada would be more than happy to enforce the contempt judgment.
Because the targets of the scam are in the US and the US mail is being used, the court has all the jurisdiction it needs. To check this, see the Supreme Court's decision in Asahi Metal Industries Co. (1987), holding that a foreign product manufacturer could be dragged into US court if it foresaw that its products would be used in the US. This case is even stronger -- the Canadian scammers intended their scam to reach the US.
Push movie downloads into the channels that were made for yesterday's AV distribution, namely cable and satellites.
Last time I checked, most content providers weren't trying to encourage downloading of full-resolution movies. In fact, it seems that the phenomenon of movies being downloaded over the Internet far predates iTunes and can be blamed largely on people who go out of their way to illegally download movies. People want movies over the Internet, without any official encouragement. If it's not Pirate Bay or iTunes then it's indie movies on AtomFilms or YouTube. I don't see any encouragement from Microsoft being the key factor here.
Tennis -- Not really, because if you cheat further over on your backhand they'll hit it to your forehand.
Lanes -- Ideally, you calibrate the percentages to relate to the damage that can be done. For example, do 50% of parking lot sweeps in the parking lot right next to the terminal (lots of damage potential), but only 30% in the next lot and 20% in the economy lot. Sure, the easiest path for a criminal would be to attack the economy lot, but they're going to do a lot less damage. Ideally, even knowing the scan frequencies, they should throw their hands up in the air and say "there's no way to win; the cops have the good targets heavily covered and all that's left are lower-value targets."
Game theory should be a required course.
So it's not really random... A pattern must come out after a while.
Not at all. A "pattern" that's useful to a criminal would be knowing that there's always a checkpoint on Lane 1 on Mondays, or that they always check Lane 4, then Lane 2, then Lane 1, then Lane 3.
Using the probabilities means that at any given moment there's a 20% chance they'll be checking Lane 1 and a 30% chance they'll be checking Lane 2, but it doesn't tell you whether you should try to smuggle contraband through 1 or 2.
It's basically ideal game theory -- even if the other side knows what your algorithm is, they can't beat it since you're still playing randomly. The usual Computer Science example is a tennis player; you know there's a 60% chance that your opponent will hit it to your backhand and a 40% chance that they'll hit it to your forehand, but there's a limit to how far you can compensate either direction. Knowing the probability in that case doesn't tell you which side the ball is going to go to. (The real example is somewhat more convoluted, but you get the 10-second version)
You mean the import/export clause: No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports...
The terms "import" and "export" in the Constitution refer to imports and exports from other countries. See the treatise here: "Only articles imported from or exported to a foreign country, or âoea place over which the Constitution has not extended its commands with respect to imports and their taxation,â are comprehended by the terms âoeimportsâ and âoeexports."
Case: Hooven & Allison Co. v. Evatt, 324 U.S. 652, 673 (1945), holding that "These provisions were intended to confer on the national government the exclusive power to tax importations of goods into the United States."
Last I checked, Amazon shipped from within the US, so it doesn't apply at all.
Or check Wikipedia on the same point:
For the purpose of this clause, "export" means really "export"--as in, export to another country.
The dormant commerce clause doesn't apply because New York can regulate goods used in New York. See my comment above.
The constitution prohibits EXPORT taxes, not import.
There's a big historic difference between the two.
New York's tax is, for all practical purposes, an import tax.
Not so fast: You're right that thanks to the "dormant commerce clause," New York can't burden out-of-state commerce or commerce that just passes right through New York without stopping. For example, New York can't tax goods that pass through New York on their way from Maine to Florida on I-95, nor commerce that happens in other states.
But, almost every state that has a sales tax also has an excise tax for people who import goods from out of state. For example, in most states if you import a car into the state then you pay the sales tax on the car even if you bought it in a state with no sales tax.
New York can very constitutionally tax goods that are used in New York. And it can reach Amazon to enforce it because Amazon has "purposefully availed" itself of the New York market by advertising there and shipping orders there. See the case Asahi Metal.
That's the modern version of "vote early and vote often."
Until they can print toasters on toast we're safe.
If a toaster can toast itself, is it self-aware?
But is the school the best place for that? I agree that the school has all the kids under one roof, but parents need to step up too. It cuts both ways.
There's nothing inherently private about posting on the open Internet. If anything, Facebook provides at least a plausible privacy shield against employers finding embarrassing photos: Don't join networks and set your privacy settings high. Something on the open Internet is out there for Google to find and the world to know. Of course you could robots.txt, but then you lose the "personal brand" aspect above. Or you could give out usernames/passwords to your friends, but that's a giant pain and doesn't scale well. There are some benefits.
But if the service wouldn't have existed at all but-for the commercial use?
Do you think Google could support 5 gig of storage for every Gmail account if it couldn't target ads? That's an indirect synergistic effect -- a service that wouldn't exist but-for creative commercialization.
And would Amazon be half as useful if it didn't provide the "users who viewed this product also bought ___" feature? That's a direct synergistic effect -- a service that is made more useful by creative commercialization.
I'm not saying every use of data by Facebook is great. They've gone way too far sometimes. But there's no inherent reason why, done RIGHT, commercial use of data can't make the service better. The ground rules still stand---each commercial use must not cause harm, nor may the aggregate---but if we assume that it's done right there's no reason why there must be tension between commercial and private. I want to use the best possible Facebook/MySpace/LiveJournal/etc service and I don't care if Zuckerberg makes a million or two in the process, so long as he doesn't do so by harming me.
The thing about Facebook is that it only knows the information you tell it. If you want to shape your "personal brand" (to use the author's term) on Facebook so you appear to be a sophisticated scholar of the finer things in life, then you're free to do so. Similarly, you're free to make yourself appear to be a slacker, an emo kid, an anarchist, or whatever other image you can come up with.
The commercialization is to some degree inevitable--after all, it's unlikely that Facebook would have ever been launched but for the hopes of striking it rich--but as long as the data is limited to what YOU provide then it's hard to complain about Facebook doing exactly what it promised it would do (namely, using that data to support the servers, coders, tech support, etc).
I don't see why it has to be zero-sum. The author suggests that we need to avoid the personal value of the data being "eclipsed" by the commercial data, but they seem totally synergistic: If Facebook can afford to hire more coders to come up with more innovative new ways to connect to each other, then it doesn't matter to me if they make more use of my data for commercial purposes, so long as EACH commercial use is not harmful. This is like the debate over ad targeting all over again -- a lot of people prefer targeted ads ("commercial value") over broadcast ads because sites can recoup their costs with fewer and less intrusive targeted ads, and targeted ads are far less annoying than the v--gra sp-m that we all get by email.
In sum -- there's no reason why commercial and personal uses are in opposition to each other. If each commercial use is not harmful (i.e., my data isn't revealed or mis used) then it supports the personal use. Synergy, not parasitism.
Except none of that is true. It'd be nice for defendants if it were, but the privilege against self-incrimination does not apply to physical evidence. The Supreme Court has never held there to be a self-incrimination right against giving PHYSICAL evidence -- just to forced TESTIMONY (getting up on the stand and actually describing what happened).
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from forcing you to participate in a lineup.
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from requesting a handwriting sample or a fingerprint.
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from requesting a voice sample.
See, eg here ("It is long settled law that fingerprinting does not violate the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against compelled self-incrimination or the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Indeed, much non-testimonial evidence does not fall under those constitutional protections, including the analysis of blood and breath for alcohol. Samples of semen, hair, and other tissues may be taken without a suspect's consent.").
See also Schember v. California, where the Supreme Court reiterated that the 5th Amendment protects against compelled testimony primarily in the spoken word sense. Blood tests weren't compelled "testimony," even if they were "compelled" in the sense that they were forcible, over protests.
We can write laws that prohibit forced fingerprints, or forced handwriting samples -- call your Congressperson and tell them to do so if that's what you believe. But there's no right in the Constitution about that.
Less mind control, more evidence of past crimes. Imagine if the government got to hook up a dream machine to see if you dreamed about committing that unsolved crime.
It's an interesting 5th Amendment argument that your dreams would be giving testimony against yourself. Our technology is SO far beyond what the Founding Fathers could ever dream of that we're in uncharted waters.
It'd be nice to think that there was a golden age of air travel when nobody wanted to use aircraft as political weapons, but that only existed prior to the 1960s when air travel became affordable for the masses. There is NO period in time when airline travel was not subject to some kind of danger. Planes have always been targeted by hijackers and bombers because it's a strong political symbol that is guaranteed to generate news coverage.
For the record, metal detectors and security screening at airports started long before 9/11, and dangers to air travel started long before then as well.
In 1976, Cubana 455, with 73 people on board, was brought down by a bomb.
In 1985, Air India Flight 182, with 329 people on board, was brought down by a bomb.
In 1988, Pam-Am Flight 103, with 259 people on board, was brought down by a bomb.
In 2000, Ahmed Ressam pleaded guilty to trying to bomb Los Angeles International airport.
May I also remind you that, just in the year 1970, there were at least 13 attempted hijackings JUST TO CUBA:
And, even after 9/11, idiots have tried to bring down commercial aircraft with bombs. They just happen to have been royally incompetent.
If you've ever gone through LHR, what I believe is still the busiest connection hub in the world, you still have to throw away all of your liquids and go through a MORE intense screening procedure than in the United States. And that's just to connect from one flight to another; in most cases in the US you don't have to be re-screened between flights!
That doesn't make Heathrow's policies right, but anybody connecting through there is just as likely to say "those crazy Brits" as "those crazy Americans."
This seems to take the concerns that people have about Google's aggregation of your data to a whole new level. Now they know not only what YOU like, but who your friends are and what THEY like too. It wouldn't be hard to make a map of the socialists, anarchists, anti-corporatists, etc, and then round them all up when there's a crime. I'm not saying that our society is anywhere near that level, but it seems to create a big risk of guilt-by-association.
Not really -- if you used a typewriter a physical letter on company letterhead and sent it inter-office then it'd be just as discoverable in litigation as an email. The question here isn't who "owns" the document, it's whether a party to litigation can get access to it. Your employer is likely going to try to protect your privacy by preventing the document from being discovered.
It's not a question of ownership at all, it's a question of access and the discovery process in litigation. The whole point of discovery is that Party A gets to go through Party B's files. For the purposes of discovery, it doesn't matter much who owns the contents of Party B's files, it just matters that Party B is holding them right now and they might (emphasis on "might") contain something relevant to the litigation.
You can argue until you're blue in the face about whether that's a good or bad arrangement, but it's a long-standing part of our civil litigation system. Plaintiffs who have been wronged think it's important to find the "smoking gun" email in company records, and there's no way to do that without going through all of the files. Companies often think that plaintiffs are just going on a "fishing expedition" by searching through documents until they find something that looks incriminating when taken out of context. And employees feel like their privacy is being violated when a third-party gets to read their email. There are a lot of moving parts here.
Insert "not" in the first sentence, to read:
To be more precise, the problem is not that the company you work for wants to read your email.
A tag broke, I apologize for not hitting "preview."
To be more precise, the problem is that the company you work for wants to read your email. The problem reference in TFA is that somebody else wants to read your email. The usual scenario is that somebody is suing the company you work for and has demanded all the company's email as part of discovery; your employer is going to fight hard to stop your email from being disclosed, but the other side might still get it.
So it's not a Big Brother problem in the sense that your own boss is watching you, it's a Big Uncle problem in that some plaintiff some number of years down the road gets to read all of the company's email as part of their lawsuit. Then they might take something you say casually in email--"man, big party last night, I'll be Jimbo's out of it today"--and use it as proof that Jimbo was acting negligently the next day.
Your privacy in the emails you send gets lost somewhere along the way. In theory, only the lawyers see the emails, but we all know that every single Enron email got posted to the Internet, which included a lot of personal stuff that has nothing to do with the sins of the bigwigs there.