Sure, but speed limits are set with regard to what is dangerous and what isn't dangerous. That's why we have 25mph in urban areas and 55+ on highways.
Dangerous is relative. 25mph in a 55mph zone can be dangerous if there's a lot of traffic or snow. 80mph in a 65mph is not dangerous if there's nobody on the road which was designed for speeds in excess of 90.
Why doesn't the same argument apply to other crimes? A burglar knows that there's only a small chance that they will get caught.
Because there is a greater chance the burglar will be caught and the punishment is meant to fit the crime. Felonies are typically investigated more fully than traffic violations and the punishment for a single burglary is not based on the assumption that he has committed other burglaries.
It might stop them speeding for a while once they get the letter. Points on their license work even better.
If you get caught speeding by a cop, he gives you a ticket, holds you up, and you most likely slow down. He stops you from speeding. Getting a ticket in the mail doesn't slow you down. It doesn't stop the dangerous activity, only punishes it.
I find this really hard to believe.
That doesn't make it false. It's already being done with Red Light Cameras. They're being placed where they will generate the most money, not where they will decrease accidents.
Tell that to someone who has had a relative killed in a car crash where the other driver was speeding/acting recklessly or inattentively.
This is an Appeal to Emotion, and you accuse me of using bogus arguments. Yes, it happens, and it's a tragedy. But it does not prove that speeding is always dangerous or that the person wouldn't have been killed if the other driver wasn't speeding. As for acting recklessly or inattentively, both can be done without speeding.
How many times does burglary lead to someone dying? Not very often. Speeding is much more likely to lead to injury and death.
How often does burglary lead to loss of property? Every single time, by definition. And the loss of property is the primary reason it is punished, not the risk of injury or death. Speeding does not always lead to injury or death.
Why is it that motorists believe that laws regarding cars (speeding, parking restrictions, environmental considerations) are merely designed to inconvenience them and not to serve some greater social good?
Would you like to point out where I said that? I never said speeding shouldn't be against the law.
How many deaths have there been from terrorism in the last ten years? How many due to cars?
Are you seriously trying to imply that a terrorist attack is less dangerous than someone exceeding the speed limit? There are so many flaws in this argument it's hard to pick a place to start.
1) not every car related death was due to speeding. 2) billions of people drive every day. A lot will exceed the speed limit at some time. Very few comparatively will kill someone. 3) The primary purpose of a terrorist attack is to kill people. 4) The number of terrorist attacks is miniscule compared to the number of times people have exceeded the speed limit.
They are the reason for all of the problems that they have with the system.
If both choices suck, why make one? Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
The fact that voter turn out is so low means that every vote is more valuable. Politicians will spend more campaign money to get them. They will promise and deliver more tax dollars for projects to get them.
That's a problem with the system, not the people.
If everyone was voting these tactics wouldn't work and they wouldn't be employed.
If everyone was voting the choices would still be the same: two people making promises to corporations in return for campaign funding. You can't win without corporate donations and you can't get corporate donations without making promises to them.
If you don't vote because you don't like the system, blame yourself as you are the cause of the current state of the system.
The only people who have the power to change the system are in power because of it. What incentive do they have to change it? The people who want to change the system can't get the power to change it. The system cannot be changed by working within it. You are supporting the system so you are the cause of it.
The real problem with a grey goo scenario is that the nanobots would have to compete on a level playing field with organic life, which has had billions of years to get better at it then them.
Except the nanobots would have no natural predators (assuming they aren't organic).
Because it's tracking people in case they commit a crime, not because they are a suspect. It's the classic "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument. Unfortunately it completely violates the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
If you speed, you have broken the law and have to take whatever punishment is deemed to be appropriate.
A) Speeding does not necessarily endanger other people every single time. There are times when 80mph is not reckless and times when 25mph is.
B) The penalties for speeding are set to be a deterrent with the understanding that speeders will be caught a small percentage of the time. If that percentage goes up, the fine becomes unfair.
C) The law is not always reasonable.
D) Getting a ticket in the mail a week later doesn't slow anyone down.
E) Devices like this make it too easy for the government to use the fines as a source of income by setting the speed limit unreasonably low knowing people will exceed it.
Should I get away with a burglary just because I wasn't caught red-handed?
There is necessarily harm to a victim in every burglary. Not so with speeding. There's a reason that burglary is punished more severely than speeding. Because it's a worse crime.
The creeping doom here is the removal of Fair Use by all means subvert and obvert.
Already done. The corporate content owner simply files suit on any unauthorized use and forces the user to hire a lawyer to defend fair use. If the gain from the fair use is less than the cost of defending the suit, the user loses, even if he's right. Rather than take the risk of having to defend fair use, most will either license it or do without.
I think you maybe misunderstand either the wiretap laws or how these particular SMSs were acquired. Judges issue warrants for wiretaps. They decide if there is probable cause that discussions about illegal activities are taking place.
I'm taking a broader look at the admissibility of saved SMS messages in general. I realize there is probably not any abuse in this case, but I am concerned that it could be abused later.
A judge issued the subpoena for these SMSs. If they were in a situation needing a warrant to get them, a judge *could* have issued a warrant in compliance with wiretap laws.
If they had issued a wiretap order to intercept the communications as they happened, I wouldn't have a problem. It's the access to the recordings of the conversations after the fact that concern me.
It seems like when you talk about "the government" getting access to these messages, you are equivocating the judge with the prosecutor. Wiretap laws limit prosecutors. Judges just administer the laws.
They are both agents of the government, though, and an accused person has just as much or more to fear from an over lenient judge as from an over zealous prosecutor. Assuming that judges will never issue a warrant incorrectly is a little naive.
The fact is that the defense probably requested these messages. There is *no* Constitutional abuse here. In fact, it is supporting the spirit of Amendment VI by allowing Bryant to get access to evidence in his defense.
There is that. As long as it is not used as evidence against the accused I don't really see a problem.
Not that you are necessarily guilty of this, but for some reason the general public believes it has this Constitutional right to privacy in all kinds of places where they *don't* have it.
I don't necessarily see privacy as a right unto itself as much as it is protection against an over zealous government. Privacy is a component of a free society. "Innocent until proven guilty" means that the government does not have the right to pry into every aspect of a citizen's life to make sure he's not violating the law. They have to have cause to believe a crime has or will be committed before they can start looking over his shoulder. The concept of privacy arose from the ideal that people should not have to live in constant fear from the law. I have privacy because they have no right to snoop, not the other way around.
If Bryant's accuser is lying, and these SMSs show it, she doesn't have a Constitutional right to keep them private.
In that she is not the one being accused, yes, you are right and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. If the prosecution were trying to subpoena Bryant's SMS messages in order to convict him, then I would have a real problem.
But we don't know if this was illegally preserved. It may have been allowed under her service agreement. They usually give the service providers a lot of latitude.
That's beside the point, though. The existence of the recording doesn't necessarily grant the government the right to have it.
As for the need of a warrant, the subpoena for the messages is similar to a warrant. Both are issued by judges. Subpoenas tell the party to cough it up while warrants allow the cops to go get it. If it was a warrant, they would have probable cause to get it.
This all presumes that the power won't be abused. I feel it is absolutely necessary to look at how it could be abused, otherwise we wouldn't need things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to limit government's power. Warrants for wiretaps require reasonable cause to believe the conversation they are looking for will happen. The inherent limit is in the architecture: they have to catch it as it happens. Allowing them access to third-party recordings of conversations that happened before they had reasonable cause gives them too much power. It's one step below requiring the phone company to record all phone conversations in case they need them later. Needing a subpoena to gain access to them is little assurance since the requirements for obtaining a subpoena could change at any time in the future. The bigger consequence is it is a presumption of guilt.
More importantly, in criminal cases, courts ought to have every right allowed by the Constitution to require evidence that might exonerate someone.
I agree with this, but I also have to wonder what would happen if the evidence gathered from such a subpoena helped incriminate the accused. Would it then be thrown out?
There is no Constitutional provision at issue here. Illegal search and seizure would be it, if any, but like I said, this was a subpoena, not a warrant.
The technical differences between a warrant and a subpoena aside, it's still the government demanding access to information they would not otherwise have. Allowing subpoenas of third-party recordings of conversations, especially those which neither party in the conversation may be aware of, is in my opinion, side-stepping the wiretap laws requiring warrants to record the conversation in the first place.
While others here correctly pointed out that an SMS is more like a postcard instead of a sealed FedEx package,
That the communication is easily intercepted does not give the government the inherent right to intercept it. Postcards are inherently more open than sealed envelopes, but it doesn't give the government the right to have an agent read every postcard going through.
This is important because the messages wouldn't have been available to just anyone, except that a judge found the evidence potentially important to finding the truth.
This is part of the point though. "Reasonable expectation of privacy" traditionally refers to the availability of the conversation to anyone, not just the government.
A judge could also order that FedEx package opened, and it would be justified if it helped discover the truth in a case.
The limitation in this is the time that the FedEx package is in transit. The contents are not available, except from the recipient, after the package is delivered. The government cannot subpoena the contents of the package from FedEx after it has left their possession.
It's also important to note that, for now, the only person reading these SMS messages is the judge himself, so he can decide if they are relevant. If they are, he turns them over to the lawyers so they can use them or prepare to argue against them. If they really aren't relevant, no one else will get to see them.
In this particular case, it is probably not an abuse of privacy, but the greater question is whether or not the government should be able to subpoena recordings of conversations that they did not have the legal right to record at the time the conversation happened. SMS messages are viewed by the user as a private conversation. Because they can be intercepted, the user should be careful what he says. That's just common sense. But the ability to intercept the communication does not give the government the right to intercept it. That's why we have wiretap laws. If the government would need a warrant to intercept the communication as it happens, they shouldn't be able to subpoena a third party recording of the conversation after it happens.
Its always been interesting that when somebody (or a group of people) don't want to hear a certain answer, it often goes in one ear and out the other just in time for another "listener" to ask the same basic question phrased slightly differently in hopes of obtaining a reply closer to the desired view. It seems that many times the media in general has this practice almost molded into an art.
It's a common technique when questioning someone to try to catch them in a lie.
Attorney: Are you aware the defendant was there?
Witness: No.
[some questions later]
Attorney: When did you become aware he was there?
Witness: He called me afterwards.
I don't doubt that Brown thought he was doing the same thing. The scary thing is that the people putting out the FUD are starting to believe their own bullshit.
The burden of proof is on the person claiming that the evidence has been tampered with. That's the way it's always been. There are certain tell-tale signs that a video or picture has been edited.
In reality, the evidence is only as good as its reliability. If the defense can cast enough doubt on the authenticity of the evidence, the judge or (more likely) jury will discount it. With the availability and quality of digital editing software increasing, you'll likely see a lot of photographic, and even video, evidence, once thought indisputable, being questioned by the courts as to its authenticity.
But to automatically assume that all evidence is completely worthless just because of "well it could have been edited..." is just absurd and places a ridiculously high burden of proof on the prosecution and forces them to prove a negative -- that the evidence has not been tampered with.
He doesn't have to prove that it wasn't tampered with, only that it was extremely unlikely or not possible without detection. DNA evidence can very easily be faked, but it is relied upon because the courts know that the procedures surrounding the forensic process make it difficult to do so.
Once that text file finds its way into the court's hands, are you saying that I can actually claim that the evidence is not admissible because someone who works at AOL might have had a grudge against me and falsified the server-side logs?
My understanding is that evidence is admissable unless it was obtained through non-legal means, or it is clearly not relevant to the case. Convincing a jury that the evidence is reliable is a different matter.
If you are doing nothing wrong then there will be no probable cause to get the info.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" has been used by governments the world over to justify eroding privacy for the sake of security. Whether the Fourth Amendment says anything about the legality of requiring text communications to be recorded, the intent is that the government must have good reason to suspect the person being searched, and be reasonably sure of what they expect to find and where they expect to find it. Requiring monitoring of citizens "just in case" they commit a crime flies in the face of that ideal.
It is eventually deleted and I'm not going to send anything important over something like a text message.
This is where "reasonable expectation of privacy" comes in. If a reasonable user of such a system is unaware that the messages may be saved, his expectation of privacy may be higher than if he was aware. If his conversations are being recorded without his knowledge, he is less likely to be careful about what he says. What makes wiretaps different from this is that the conversations cannot be recorded without him being a suspect first, and, theoretically at least, law enforcement must show reasonable cause that he is a suspect before the conversations can be recorded. Allowing law enforcement to retrieve conversations that took place before he was a suspect also violates this ideal.
The main problem, as stated in the article, is that most people aren't aware their messages can be retrieved as much as four months after they were sent.
The fact that Windows is everywhere is why it's such a tempting target; a hit rate of 1% on virus infection of Windows PCs is a good number, so it's worth going after. If linux had a good market share, it would be running the spam zombies.
Windows was developed to be easy to use first and secure much farther down the list. Having to deal with permissions for files and devices makes using a computer harder, so they defaulted to "everybody run as root". When Windows 3.1 came out, the Internet wasn't even public yet and very few computers were networked together, so security was not as important. But these days more computers are online constantly and the Internet is a much, much bigger place with lots more nasties running about. Microsoft has addressed this but it has done so by attempting to put security on top of an insecure model. Windows has the market share it does because it was easy to use and it was easy to use because it was insecure.
but the fact is that over 90% of these zombie PCs could have prevented infection by simply having (a) their firewalls enabled and/or (b) having intelligent users.
Most of these spam viruses got delivered through email, so a firewall wouldn't help, and, by design, Windows' market was not intelligent users. A much better solution would be not allowing just anyone to install just any program without at least logging in as an administrator first. I'm willing to bet a lot of these viruses never would have gotten installed if the recipient had to enter a password in order to do it. The email viruses are a social engineering attack. They fool the user into running an attachment they believe is harmless (eg..pif or.exe files disguised as.doc or.txt files). Windows, by default, hides.pif and.exe extensions from the user preventing him from seeing the true nature of the file. At least a warning message saying "you don't have access to run this program" would alert some people to the fact that something was amiss, especially if they don't normally need a password to open.txt or.doc files. Even not obscuring the file extensions would go along way, but that was a decision Microsoft made for ease of use despite that it would lead to security problems.
So, yes, Windows has a much higher market share which makes them a nice target, but there are inherent security flaws which makes that large target much easier to hit. Being such a large target makes them more responsible for securing their software, not less.
Unless I'm reading this wrong (again IANA biologist/chemist), these studies appear to be focusing on tetra- and penta-BDE's while the study cited in the original article appears to be testing for deca-BDE's. I have no idea how they differ, if at all.
Maybe, but I can't imagine anyone ever coming back in a couple of years and saying these chemicals are good for us.
As far as I can tell, nobody can really tell for sure that they are bad for us now. I haven't been able to find any health effects on humans, and the studies I have found are limited to lab mice and don't appear to be conclusive (IANA biologist). If someone could point me towards something a little more conclusive I would appreciate it.
I'm not saying there definitely isn't a problem, but at the very least it looks like we need more research. There's enough bad science going on now to make me skeptical of any health warnings printed in major news media, and the article takes it as a given that PDBE's are toxic to humans while only really reporting that they are present in computers.
Not that I like the way the patent system works but I don't think that a high greenlight percentage by itself proves that something is wrong.
The flaw in your argument is that the 95% approval rate is not the only evidence that something is wrong.
Rather, it proves that there is a common understanding between applicants and examiners what will and will not pass.
The problem is that a good portion of what is passing should not be.
In an ideal and perfectly transparent system people know beforehand what will pass and don't bother applying if it will not.
But being perfectly transparent is not sufficient. The output may be perfectly predictable with known inputs and still not be correct. What will pass must also be what should pass and that's what the argument is about.
Costs do limit the margins on recorded music production and distribution. This is why the RIAA is fighting tooth and nail against P2P. The entirety of the value they add to the music industry is through the distribution of music. A legal, "free" distribution model would mean there'd be vastly less money in it for them.
The RIAA is fighting P2P because it makes them obsolete. For a couple thousand dollars, a band can produce a quality album and distribute it themselves over the Internet, which the consumer can then burn to a CD or put directly on an MP3 player. The album artwork can even be sent electronically and printed on the consumer's machine. There's no longer a need for an entire industry to produce and ship the plastic discs. Under P2P, the distribution model no longer has any value to the artists or to the consumer. The labels do also provide marketing, which is of value to the artist, but since this marketing gets paid for by the sales of the plastic discs, it's still reliant on the distribution model. There's just no incentive for the recording industry to adopt P2P. They've been making so much money for so long on their current business model that the risk of adopting a new technology that would unseat that business model is just too high.
Let's punish them for their greed by pirating the hell out of the game and calling it a social protest!
Do you even read the posts you're replying to? Where did I say anything that justified copyright infringement?
Selling at below cost is always good for business.
Yeah, and selling for above what people will pay for it is just as good. Consumers don't give a shit about how much it costs to produce, only about the value of the product to them compared to the price. If it costs more to make than people are willing to pay for it, the product fails. That's economics.
And, I'm sure that Slashdotters
Ah, yes. The sure sign of a reasonable argument: pigeon-holing everyone into a small subset of people you disagree with. That must mean I'm wrong.
have a much better understanding of the supply/demand curve in the record industry than, say, the accountants and economists who actually work for that industry.
You don't have to be an economist to see that the DVD, with 114 minutes of movie, plus bonus features, has more value to the consumer than the CD with 15 tracks that are, surprise, in the movie, for the same price. If I've got $15 to spend on entertainment, guess which one I'm buying.
I'm looking forward to the first person to +5 insightfully point out that CDs cost only $0.25 to press [blah blah blah]
Nice strawman. You can't prove your point by winning an argument against yourself.
I know that they are not as big as they used to be but artist still make money from concerts don't they.
I have no idea if it's true, but I've heard that concerts are often expected to lose money but help promote album sales.
But that aside, the point is that if Joe Consumer has $15 to spend on entertainment, is he going to buy a DVD with 90-120 minutes of movie plus bonus features, or a CD with 40-60 minutes of music, most of which is filler? He's going to choose the product which gives him the most value for his money. He doesn't care why CD's are so expensive, only that they are. The recording industry has to either drop the price (if necessary, by finding a way to cut the costs), or increase the value.
After the quoted sentence, I went on to talk about music (wo)men vs money (wo)men.
I agree with you. I was trying to point out that while predicting the success of any particular artist is hard, it's still their job and the business they chose to be in (although, after re-reading my post, I may have worded it more strongly than was warranted. It wasn't directed at you).
Granting them the benefit of a doubt, you just may not KNOW if a new artist is going to sell, because there's no experience. Nor can you be timid if you're really going to PUSH a promising artist, because the chain to stardom has many links, and breaking one breaks the chain.
No one can know for sure whether a new artist is going to sell. But their job is to try to predict it the best they can by doing market research and having informed opinions on what a profitable artist is. Television studios, movie studios and book publishers all have to decide what to produce and what not to, and these industries aren't complaining about the "cost" of being wrong. Why should the music industry be any different?
Those prices do seem out of whack but you have to understand that when a movie goes to DVD, it is most likely already in the profit range. Movies are paid for at the box office. This is why DVDs can be the same price or even less than their soundtracks.
That doesn't change the value of the DVD to the consumer, though. If the market would allow them to charge more for the DVD, they would. People are buying DVD's because they perceive the value to be worth the price.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but speed limits are set with regard to what is dangerous and what isn't dangerous. That's why we have 25mph in urban areas and 55+ on highways.
Dangerous is relative. 25mph in a 55mph zone can be dangerous if there's a lot of traffic or snow. 80mph in a 65mph is not dangerous if there's nobody on the road which was designed for speeds in excess of 90.
Why doesn't the same argument apply to other crimes? A burglar knows that there's only a small chance that they will get caught.
Because there is a greater chance the burglar will be caught and the punishment is meant to fit the crime. Felonies are typically investigated more fully than traffic violations and the punishment for a single burglary is not based on the assumption that he has committed other burglaries.
It might stop them speeding for a while once they get the letter. Points on their license work even better.
If you get caught speeding by a cop, he gives you a ticket, holds you up, and you most likely slow down. He stops you from speeding. Getting a ticket in the mail doesn't slow you down. It doesn't stop the dangerous activity, only punishes it.
I find this really hard to believe.
That doesn't make it false. It's already being done with Red Light Cameras. They're being placed where they will generate the most money, not where they will decrease accidents.
Tell that to someone who has had a relative killed in a car crash where the other driver was speeding/acting recklessly or inattentively.
This is an Appeal to Emotion, and you accuse me of using bogus arguments. Yes, it happens, and it's a tragedy. But it does not prove that speeding is always dangerous or that the person wouldn't have been killed if the other driver wasn't speeding. As for acting recklessly or inattentively, both can be done without speeding.
How many times does burglary lead to someone dying? Not very often. Speeding is much more likely to lead to injury and death.
How often does burglary lead to loss of property? Every single time, by definition. And the loss of property is the primary reason it is punished, not the risk of injury or death. Speeding does not always lead to injury or death.
Why is it that motorists believe that laws regarding cars (speeding, parking restrictions, environmental considerations) are merely designed to inconvenience them and not to serve some greater social good?
Would you like to point out where I said that? I never said speeding shouldn't be against the law.
How many deaths have there been from terrorism in the last ten years? How many due to cars?
Are you seriously trying to imply that a terrorist attack is less dangerous than someone exceeding the speed limit? There are so many flaws in this argument it's hard to pick a place to start.
1) not every car related death was due to speeding.
2) billions of people drive every day. A lot will exceed the speed limit at some time. Very few comparatively will kill someone.
3) The primary purpose of a terrorist attack is to kill people.
4) The number of terrorist attacks is miniscule compared to the number of times people have exceeded the speed limit.
Nanobots wouldn't be mechanical, they would be chemical, just like bacteria.
Being chemical doesn't necessarily make them organic. The point of them being inorganic is that they wouldn't be a food source for other predators.
Why would anyone try to scale down an electromotor if nature has already demonstrated better ways to propel a nanomachine?
There are a number of ways of turning energy into motion on a nanoscale without using organic components.
They are the reason for all of the problems that they have with the system.
If both choices suck, why make one? Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
The fact that voter turn out is so low means that every vote is more valuable. Politicians will spend more campaign money to get them. They will promise and deliver more tax dollars for projects to get them.
That's a problem with the system, not the people.
If everyone was voting these tactics wouldn't work and they wouldn't be employed.
If everyone was voting the choices would still be the same: two people making promises to corporations in return for campaign funding. You can't win without corporate donations and you can't get corporate donations without making promises to them.
If you don't vote because you don't like the system, blame yourself as you are the cause of the current state of the system.
The only people who have the power to change the system are in power because of it. What incentive do they have to change it? The people who want to change the system can't get the power to change it. The system cannot be changed by working within it. You are supporting the system so you are the cause of it.
The real problem with a grey goo scenario is that the nanobots would have to compete on a level playing field with organic life, which has had billions of years to get better at it then them.
Except the nanobots would have no natural predators (assuming they aren't organic).
If you want to blame someone, blame the 60% of the electorate who can't be bothered to vote.
If 60% of the people have lost faith in the system, it's the system, not the people, that is the problem.
Why would this worry you?
Because it's tracking people in case they commit a crime, not because they are a suspect. It's the classic "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument. Unfortunately it completely violates the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
If you speed, you have broken the law and have to take whatever punishment is deemed to be appropriate.
A) Speeding does not necessarily endanger other people every single time. There are times when 80mph is not reckless and times when 25mph is.
B) The penalties for speeding are set to be a deterrent with the understanding that speeders will be caught a small percentage of the time. If that percentage goes up, the fine becomes unfair.
C) The law is not always reasonable.
D) Getting a ticket in the mail a week later doesn't slow anyone down.
E) Devices like this make it too easy for the government to use the fines as a source of income by setting the speed limit unreasonably low knowing people will exceed it.
Should I get away with a burglary just because I wasn't caught red-handed?
There is necessarily harm to a victim in every burglary. Not so with speeding. There's a reason that burglary is punished more severely than speeding. Because it's a worse crime.
The creeping doom here is the removal of Fair Use by all means subvert and obvert.
Already done. The corporate content owner simply files suit on any unauthorized use and forces the user to hire a lawyer to defend fair use. If the gain from the fair use is less than the cost of defending the suit, the user loses, even if he's right. Rather than take the risk of having to defend fair use, most will either license it or do without.
I think you maybe misunderstand either the wiretap laws or how these particular SMSs were acquired. Judges issue warrants for wiretaps. They decide if there is probable cause that discussions about illegal activities are taking place.
I'm taking a broader look at the admissibility of saved SMS messages in general. I realize there is probably not any abuse in this case, but I am concerned that it could be abused later.
A judge issued the subpoena for these SMSs. If they were in a situation needing a warrant to get them, a judge *could* have issued a warrant in compliance with wiretap laws.
If they had issued a wiretap order to intercept the communications as they happened, I wouldn't have a problem. It's the access to the recordings of the conversations after the fact that concern me.
It seems like when you talk about "the government" getting access to these messages, you are equivocating the judge with the prosecutor. Wiretap laws limit prosecutors. Judges just administer the laws.
They are both agents of the government, though, and an accused person has just as much or more to fear from an over lenient judge as from an over zealous prosecutor. Assuming that judges will never issue a warrant incorrectly is a little naive.
The fact is that the defense probably requested these messages. There is *no* Constitutional abuse here. In fact, it is supporting the spirit of Amendment VI by allowing Bryant to get access to evidence in his defense.
There is that. As long as it is not used as evidence against the accused I don't really see a problem.
Not that you are necessarily guilty of this, but for some reason the general public believes it has this Constitutional right to privacy in all kinds of places where they *don't* have it.
I don't necessarily see privacy as a right unto itself as much as it is protection against an over zealous government. Privacy is a component of a free society. "Innocent until proven guilty" means that the government does not have the right to pry into every aspect of a citizen's life to make sure he's not violating the law. They have to have cause to believe a crime has or will be committed before they can start looking over his shoulder. The concept of privacy arose from the ideal that people should not have to live in constant fear from the law. I have privacy because they have no right to snoop, not the other way around.
If Bryant's accuser is lying, and these SMSs show it, she doesn't have a Constitutional right to keep them private.
In that she is not the one being accused, yes, you are right and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. If the prosecution were trying to subpoena Bryant's SMS messages in order to convict him, then I would have a real problem.
But we don't know if this was illegally preserved. It may have been allowed under her service agreement. They usually give the service providers a lot of latitude.
That's beside the point, though. The existence of the recording doesn't necessarily grant the government the right to have it.
As for the need of a warrant, the subpoena for the messages is similar to a warrant. Both are issued by judges. Subpoenas tell the party to cough it up while warrants allow the cops to go get it. If it was a warrant, they would have probable cause to get it.
This all presumes that the power won't be abused. I feel it is absolutely necessary to look at how it could be abused, otherwise we wouldn't need things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to limit government's power. Warrants for wiretaps require reasonable cause to believe the conversation they are looking for will happen. The inherent limit is in the architecture: they have to catch it as it happens. Allowing them access to third-party recordings of conversations that happened before they had reasonable cause gives them too much power. It's one step below requiring the phone company to record all phone conversations in case they need them later. Needing a subpoena to gain access to them is little assurance since the requirements for obtaining a subpoena could change at any time in the future. The bigger consequence is it is a presumption of guilt.
More importantly, in criminal cases, courts ought to have every right allowed by the Constitution to require evidence that might exonerate someone.
I agree with this, but I also have to wonder what would happen if the evidence gathered from such a subpoena helped incriminate the accused. Would it then be thrown out?
There is no Constitutional provision at issue here. Illegal search and seizure would be it, if any, but like I said, this was a subpoena, not a warrant.
The technical differences between a warrant and a subpoena aside, it's still the government demanding access to information they would not otherwise have. Allowing subpoenas of third-party recordings of conversations, especially those which neither party in the conversation may be aware of, is in my opinion, side-stepping the wiretap laws requiring warrants to record the conversation in the first place.
While others here correctly pointed out that an SMS is more like a postcard instead of a sealed FedEx package,
That the communication is easily intercepted does not give the government the inherent right to intercept it. Postcards are inherently more open than sealed envelopes, but it doesn't give the government the right to have an agent read every postcard going through.
This is important because the messages wouldn't have been available to just anyone, except that a judge found the evidence potentially important to finding the truth.
This is part of the point though. "Reasonable expectation of privacy" traditionally refers to the availability of the conversation to anyone, not just the government.
A judge could also order that FedEx package opened, and it would be justified if it helped discover the truth in a case.
The limitation in this is the time that the FedEx package is in transit. The contents are not available, except from the recipient, after the package is delivered. The government cannot subpoena the contents of the package from FedEx after it has left their possession.
It's also important to note that, for now, the only person reading these SMS messages is the judge himself, so he can decide if they are relevant. If they are, he turns them over to the lawyers so they can use them or prepare to argue against them. If they really aren't relevant, no one else will get to see them.
In this particular case, it is probably not an abuse of privacy, but the greater question is whether or not the government should be able to subpoena recordings of conversations that they did not have the legal right to record at the time the conversation happened. SMS messages are viewed by the user as a private conversation. Because they can be intercepted, the user should be careful what he says. That's just common sense. But the ability to intercept the communication does not give the government the right to intercept it. That's why we have wiretap laws. If the government would need a warrant to intercept the communication as it happens, they shouldn't be able to subpoena a third party recording of the conversation after it happens.
Its always been interesting that when somebody (or a group of people) don't want to hear a certain answer, it often goes in one ear and out the other just in time for another "listener" to ask the same basic question phrased slightly differently in hopes of obtaining a reply closer to the desired view. It seems that many times the media in general has this practice almost molded into an art.
It's a common technique when questioning someone to try to catch them in a lie.
Attorney: Are you aware the defendant was there?
Witness: No.
[some questions later]
Attorney: When did you become aware he was there?
Witness: He called me afterwards.
I don't doubt that Brown thought he was doing the same thing. The scary thing is that the people putting out the FUD are starting to believe their own bullshit.
The burden of proof is on the person claiming that the evidence has been tampered with. That's the way it's always been. There are certain tell-tale signs that a video or picture has been edited.
..." is just absurd and places a ridiculously high burden of proof on the prosecution and forces them to prove a negative -- that the evidence has not been tampered with.
In reality, the evidence is only as good as its reliability. If the defense can cast enough doubt on the authenticity of the evidence, the judge or (more likely) jury will discount it. With the availability and quality of digital editing software increasing, you'll likely see a lot of photographic, and even video, evidence, once thought indisputable, being questioned by the courts as to its authenticity.
But to automatically assume that all evidence is completely worthless just because of "well it could have been edited
He doesn't have to prove that it wasn't tampered with, only that it was extremely unlikely or not possible without detection. DNA evidence can very easily be faked, but it is relied upon because the courts know that the procedures surrounding the forensic process make it difficult to do so.
Once that text file finds its way into the court's hands, are you saying that I can actually claim that the evidence is not admissible because someone who works at AOL might have had a grudge against me and falsified the server-side logs?
My understanding is that evidence is admissable unless it was obtained through non-legal means, or it is clearly not relevant to the case. Convincing a jury that the evidence is reliable is a different matter.
If you are doing nothing wrong then there will be no probable cause to get the info.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" has been used by governments the world over to justify eroding privacy for the sake of security. Whether the Fourth Amendment says anything about the legality of requiring text communications to be recorded, the intent is that the government must have good reason to suspect the person being searched, and be reasonably sure of what they expect to find and where they expect to find it. Requiring monitoring of citizens "just in case" they commit a crime flies in the face of that ideal.
It is eventually deleted and I'm not going to send anything important over something like a text message.
This is where "reasonable expectation of privacy" comes in. If a reasonable user of such a system is unaware that the messages may be saved, his expectation of privacy may be higher than if he was aware. If his conversations are being recorded without his knowledge, he is less likely to be careful about what he says. What makes wiretaps different from this is that the conversations cannot be recorded without him being a suspect first, and, theoretically at least, law enforcement must show reasonable cause that he is a suspect before the conversations can be recorded. Allowing law enforcement to retrieve conversations that took place before he was a suspect also violates this ideal.
The main problem, as stated in the article, is that most people aren't aware their messages can be retrieved as much as four months after they were sent.
The fact that Windows is everywhere is why it's such a tempting target; a hit rate of 1% on virus infection of Windows PCs is a good number, so it's worth going after. If linux had a good market share, it would be running the spam zombies.
.pif or .exe files disguised as .doc or .txt files). Windows, by default, hides .pif and .exe extensions from the user preventing him from seeing the true nature of the file. At least a warning message saying "you don't have access to run this program" would alert some people to the fact that something was amiss, especially if they don't normally need a password to open .txt or .doc files. Even not obscuring the file extensions would go along way, but that was a decision Microsoft made for ease of use despite that it would lead to security problems.
Windows was developed to be easy to use first and secure much farther down the list. Having to deal with permissions for files and devices makes using a computer harder, so they defaulted to "everybody run as root". When Windows 3.1 came out, the Internet wasn't even public yet and very few computers were networked together, so security was not as important. But these days more computers are online constantly and the Internet is a much, much bigger place with lots more nasties running about. Microsoft has addressed this but it has done so by attempting to put security on top of an insecure model. Windows has the market share it does because it was easy to use and it was easy to use because it was insecure.
but the fact is that over 90% of these zombie PCs could have prevented infection by simply having (a) their firewalls enabled and/or (b) having intelligent users.
Most of these spam viruses got delivered through email, so a firewall wouldn't help, and, by design, Windows' market was not intelligent users. A much better solution would be not allowing just anyone to install just any program without at least logging in as an administrator first. I'm willing to bet a lot of these viruses never would have gotten installed if the recipient had to enter a password in order to do it. The email viruses are a social engineering attack. They fool the user into running an attachment they believe is harmless (eg.
So, yes, Windows has a much higher market share which makes them a nice target, but there are inherent security flaws which makes that large target much easier to hit. Being such a large target makes them more responsible for securing their software, not less.
Unless I'm reading this wrong (again IANA biologist/chemist), these studies appear to be focusing on tetra- and penta-BDE's while the study cited in the original article appears to be testing for deca-BDE's. I have no idea how they differ, if at all.
Maybe, but I can't imagine anyone ever coming back in a couple of years and saying these chemicals are good for us.
As far as I can tell, nobody can really tell for sure that they are bad for us now. I haven't been able to find any health effects on humans, and the studies I have found are limited to lab mice and don't appear to be conclusive (IANA biologist). If someone could point me towards something a little more conclusive I would appreciate it.
I'm not saying there definitely isn't a problem, but at the very least it looks like we need more research. There's enough bad science going on now to make me skeptical of any health warnings printed in major news media, and the article takes it as a given that PDBE's are toxic to humans while only really reporting that they are present in computers.
Not that I like the way the patent system works but I don't think that a high greenlight percentage by itself proves that something is wrong.
The flaw in your argument is that the 95% approval rate is not the only evidence that something is wrong.
Rather, it proves that there is a common understanding between applicants and examiners what will and will not pass.
The problem is that a good portion of what is passing should not be.
In an ideal and perfectly transparent system people know beforehand what will pass and don't bother applying if it will not.
But being perfectly transparent is not sufficient. The output may be perfectly predictable with known inputs and still not be correct. What will pass must also be what should pass and that's what the argument is about.
Was there a point in there that disagreed with me, or were you just restating my case in plainer terms ?
I was more trying to elaborate why the recording industry has no interest in adopting P2P instead of fighting it.
Costs do limit the margins on recorded music production and distribution. This is why the RIAA is fighting tooth and nail against P2P. The entirety of the value they add to the music industry is through the distribution of music. A legal, "free" distribution model would mean there'd be vastly less money in it for them.
The RIAA is fighting P2P because it makes them obsolete. For a couple thousand dollars, a band can produce a quality album and distribute it themselves over the Internet, which the consumer can then burn to a CD or put directly on an MP3 player. The album artwork can even be sent electronically and printed on the consumer's machine. There's no longer a need for an entire industry to produce and ship the plastic discs. Under P2P, the distribution model no longer has any value to the artists or to the consumer. The labels do also provide marketing, which is of value to the artist, but since this marketing gets paid for by the sales of the plastic discs, it's still reliant on the distribution model. There's just no incentive for the recording industry to adopt P2P. They've been making so much money for so long on their current business model that the risk of adopting a new technology that would unseat that business model is just too high.
Let's punish them for their greed by pirating the hell out of the game and calling it a social protest!
Do you even read the posts you're replying to? Where did I say anything that justified copyright infringement?
Selling at below cost is always good for business.
Yeah, and selling for above what people will pay for it is just as good. Consumers don't give a shit about how much it costs to produce, only about the value of the product to them compared to the price. If it costs more to make than people are willing to pay for it, the product fails. That's economics.
And, I'm sure that Slashdotters
Ah, yes. The sure sign of a reasonable argument: pigeon-holing everyone into a small subset of people you disagree with. That must mean I'm wrong.
have a much better understanding of the supply/demand curve in the record industry than, say, the accountants and economists who actually work for that industry.
You don't have to be an economist to see that the DVD, with 114 minutes of movie, plus bonus features, has more value to the consumer than the CD with 15 tracks that are, surprise, in the movie, for the same price. If I've got $15 to spend on entertainment, guess which one I'm buying.
I'm looking forward to the first person to +5 insightfully point out that CDs cost only $0.25 to press [blah blah blah]
Nice strawman. You can't prove your point by winning an argument against yourself.
I know that they are not as big as they used to be but artist still make money from concerts don't they.
I have no idea if it's true, but I've heard that concerts are often expected to lose money but help promote album sales.
But that aside, the point is that if Joe Consumer has $15 to spend on entertainment, is he going to buy a DVD with 90-120 minutes of movie plus bonus features, or a CD with 40-60 minutes of music, most of which is filler? He's going to choose the product which gives him the most value for his money. He doesn't care why CD's are so expensive, only that they are. The recording industry has to either drop the price (if necessary, by finding a way to cut the costs), or increase the value.
By reading the document, you are therefore in material breach of a contract that you haven't even read yet.
"By reading this contract, you are agreeing to its terms..."
After the quoted sentence, I went on to talk about music (wo)men vs money (wo)men.
I agree with you. I was trying to point out that while predicting the success of any particular artist is hard, it's still their job and the business they chose to be in (although, after re-reading my post, I may have worded it more strongly than was warranted. It wasn't directed at you).
Granting them the benefit of a doubt, you just may not KNOW if a new artist is going to sell, because there's no experience. Nor can you be timid if you're really going to PUSH a promising artist, because the chain to stardom has many links, and breaking one breaks the chain.
No one can know for sure whether a new artist is going to sell. But their job is to try to predict it the best they can by doing market research and having informed opinions on what a profitable artist is. Television studios, movie studios and book publishers all have to decide what to produce and what not to, and these industries aren't complaining about the "cost" of being wrong. Why should the music industry be any different?
Those prices do seem out of whack but you have to understand that when a movie goes to DVD, it is most likely already in the profit range. Movies are paid for at the box office. This is why DVDs can be the same price or even less than their soundtracks.
That doesn't change the value of the DVD to the consumer, though. If the market would allow them to charge more for the DVD, they would. People are buying DVD's because they perceive the value to be worth the price.