And that's not hyperbole. I once worked at a restaurant which had a food slicer. There was a warning posted to the wall next to it in bold 144 pt. text, "WARNING: BLADE WILL CUT". I should hope so. If it doesn't there's something wrong.
How is it met? On what basis does that maintain the legal expectation of privacy (which is definitely NOT the same as, "I expect them to keep it private.")? Why does it matter that it's a machine examining the content or a human being? And, you asking them to do so on your behalf isn't material: once they have the information it's out of your control unless there is a legal expectation of privacy or other legal protection.
There are counter examples where there is not expectation of privacy surrounding information likely not viewed by any human, e.g. your bank transactions.
If you read the EFF link I included above you'll find this:
As the Supreme Court has stated, "The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed." This means that you will often have no Fourth Amendment protection in the records that others keep about you, because most information that a third party will have about you was either given freely to them by you, thus knowingly exposed, or was collected from other, public sources. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you thought you were handing over the information in confidence, or if you thought the information was only going to be used for a particular purpose.
Also:
There may be privacy statutes that protect against the sharing of information about you — some communications records receive special legal protection, for example — but there is likely no constitutional protection, and it is often very easy for the government to get a hold of these third party records without your ever being notified.
IMO it's far from clear that emails stored on a third party server would receive constitutional protection under the 4th Amendment if/when this gets to the Supreme Court. There do seem to be some limited statutory protections in place.
An analogy might be postcards. If you send a letter in an envelope the contents enjoy 4th Amendment protections (but the to/from addresses do not). If, on the other hand, you write a postcard, the contents are NOT protected by the 4th Amendment regardless of whether anyone actually reads it because it is exposed to anyone who may look. Similarly, for a plain text email stored on a third party, any employee of the third party with sufficient privileges can look at your email. If this analogy holds, then there's no 4th Amendment protection from such an email. I don't see that it really matters if it's exposed on a physical object or exposed in a file. Ultimately, you decide to hand it over to a third party in a form they can read at which point there's a pretty strong argument you lose the reasonable expectation of privacy.
That said, I think email should be protected. But 4th Amendment protections may not apply and statutory measures are needed.
Another wrinkle is some email providers look at your email as a matter of business for various (advertising, marking spam, etc.) purposes. Would these emails then be protected?
Assume emails would enjoy 4th Amendment protection if the email provider doesn't know the contents. Even if they're only scanning headers, it seems to me there's an argument that the email provider now knows what your headers contain and I'd guess the IRS or other government agencies could glean quite a bit from that as well as who you're sending to and from. If they're scanning the contents as well, are they still protected?
Tell me: if you gave someone a sealed envelope and asked them to not read the contents -- even though there is absolutely nothing stopping them from tearing open the envelope and reading it -- does that constitute "revealing" the information?
Not exactly the same. It's more akin to sending a telegraph. "Here's this message, in plain text. Give it to this person." Your email provider is given the message in a plainly readable format with no protections (even as flimsy as a sealed envelop).
An ISP has to take positive, affirmative steps to read an email that is stored on their server. Just as someone working for a phone company has to take positive, affirmative steps to access the content of a phone conversation, or your voice mail.
Again, not exactly. The phone company doesn't store a recording of your phone conversations as a matter of course. Your email provider does.
The point here isn't whether it's right (morally, or even legally) for your ISP to turn this over but rather whether it's a violation of the 4th Amendment for the government to receive and use the emails with a warrant. And there's a clear argument that it's not. I don't know the argument would win in court (indeed, it didn't in the 6th Circuit), but it's not settled law across the United States. If it's not protected by the 4th Amendment, any protections are statutory, not Constitutional. And that can lead to seemingly similar things getting treated differently. I don't agree with this line, but the argument exists and I can't dismiss it out of hand.
I'm not an expert on the matter. Are voice mails held to be protected by the 4th Amendment, or are the protected by statute? If it's by statute, then they may well be treated differently than emails, receiving additional protects beyond those constitutionally required.
Why should voice mails be private, yet emails not? Explain please.
That shouldn't be the case. But that doesn't mean it's not the case. It sounds like you're expecting the law to make sense to non-lawyers.
Except in the case when your email is stored on a third party's server. There's quite a bit of case law that you don't have a legal expectation of privacy with regards to information revealed to a third party, e.g. emails stored on a web mail provider's server.
From the EFF (https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/govt/privacy): "...some Supreme Court cases have held that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information you have "knowingly exposed" to a third party — for example, bank records or records of telephone numbers you have dialed — even if you intended for that third party to keep the information secret. In other words, by engaging in transactions with your bank or communicating phone numbers to your phone company for the purpose of connecting a call, you’ve "assumed the risk" that they will share that information with the government."
It's certainly a reasonable interpretation that you knowingly expose the contents of you email to your provider and so it's not protected by the 4th amendment. Even if you encrypt it, the envelope (from/to addresses, etc.) wouldn't be protected.
Energy consumption, or electrical energy consumption? Total energy consumption is greater than electrical energy consumption by a pretty big factor (fuel for vehicles, natural gas for heating/cooking, etc.). Wolfram reports annual world electrical consumption of about 20230 TWh or 2.3 TW, which gives about 1/75th.
The article states it doesn't cover non-sporting semi-automatic firearms, so it would allow, for example, 3D printing a semiautomatic AR-15 clones. Unless you meet the definitions of a Title 2 firearm (which would include, for example, an AR-15 with a barrel less than 16 inches (406.4 mm) long), sporting purposes really only affect imported shotguns and semiautomatic rifles as well as shotguns in general (they're an exception to the general rule of a bore over 0.50 inches (12.7 mm) being a Title 2 firearm due to sporting purposes).
The basic manufacturer's license allows the manufacture of any non-Title 2 firearm. An additional tax can be paid to allow the manufacture of Title 2 firearms (including short barreled rifles and shotguns, firearms with bores greater than 0.50 inches, etc. but NOT machine guns for anyone but the government).
One other side of this is the right to free of association held to derive from the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech (NAACP v. Alabama). Thus, by SCOTUS precedent, there is a right for people to associate for purposes of speech. I think there is an argument that prohibiting a corporation (or other non-natural person, such as a union) from political speech would be a violation of this right.
This is a case where I can see the basis for the decision but disagree with the outcome.
Nope. Now, I know this is idealistic, but they're supposed to rule for whomever is in the right under the law, not based on who the parties are nor even whether the justices even like the ruling.
Good policies can be unconstitutional just as bad policies can be constitutional. All the SCOTUS should be doing is deciding the constitutionality question, not opining on the value of the policy itself. Obviously, there are some exceptions to this, with the levels of scrutiny, equity opposed to law, etc.
Of course, now they'll start publishing region-specific versions of the texts so the Asian version will have the wrong problem set for North American coursework and prices will increase.
They're not supposed to rule in favor of consumers. Or corporations. They're supposed to rule in "favor" of the law, regardless of which side is popular. The why of a ruling is more important, often, than which side wins and the "right" ruling can be made for the wrong reasons.
Nope. That's the one which prevents the States from doing so. There aren't any limits on the Federal government in the 14th.
Well, except a little bit in section 4, "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void." But, that's hardly germane to this issue. Other than that, it's all restrictions on others than the Federal government (States or persons) or grants of power to the Federal government.
80% isn't bad because there's a selection bias toward cases which are likely to be overturned in cases appealed to the Supreme Court as well as with the Court's decision to grant certiorari. Cases which don't have a chance at getting overturned often either aren't appealed or aren't granted certiorari.
The 9th Circuit's rate of getting overturned by the Supreme Court is not unusual among the circuits. Every year some have a higher rate than the 9th and some lower. They just hear the most cases at the circuit level and generate the most appeals.
All the circuits have a pretty high rate of getting overturned since there's some selection bias in the cases which are appealed to the court. First when deciding to file an appeal since you're not going to unless you think you can win. Second, in granting cert which only occurs when the justice responsible for the circuit thinks there's something to the appeal, else he or she would deny cert.
They may have good reasons to do it, but it's still a reason I won't buy it for various reasons, most importantly, will I still be able to play it in 20 years? I still pull out Civ 2 from time to time, as well as other games from the early-mid 1990s. I don't have any expectation of being able to do the same with titles like this.
Which, of course, means every agent within the DHS has the exact same authorities, duties, and powers, or that the paperwork is prepared by agents and not some office staff. Not everyone employee of DHS (or, more particularly, ICE) is an agent. Field agents, like this, may not be able to prepare the paperwork.
An example I know about has to do with another part of DHS, the ATF. Only a small set of examiners in an office in West Virginia can approve transfers of Title 2 firearms (machine guns, silencers, etc.). The ATF agent in your local office can't.
This could well be a similar situation and, from the information provided, we don't know.
The agency didn't, or the agent, who it's possible doesn't have the authority to correct errors? I usually find in these sorts of stories a lot of relevant information isn't reported.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's not hyperbole. I once worked at a restaurant which had a food slicer. There was a warning posted to the wall next to it in bold 144 pt. text, "WARNING: BLADE WILL CUT". I should hope so. If it doesn't there's something wrong.
How is it met? On what basis does that maintain the legal expectation of privacy (which is definitely NOT the same as, "I expect them to keep it private.")? Why does it matter that it's a machine examining the content or a human being? And, you asking them to do so on your behalf isn't material: once they have the information it's out of your control unless there is a legal expectation of privacy or other legal protection.
There are counter examples where there is not expectation of privacy surrounding information likely not viewed by any human, e.g. your bank transactions.
If you read the EFF link I included above you'll find this:
As the Supreme Court has stated, "The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed." This means that you will often have no Fourth Amendment protection in the records that others keep about you, because most information that a third party will have about you was either given freely to them by you, thus knowingly exposed, or was collected from other, public sources. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you thought you were handing over the information in confidence, or if you thought the information was only going to be used for a particular purpose.
Also:
There may be privacy statutes that protect against the sharing of information about you — some communications records receive special legal protection, for example — but there is likely no constitutional protection, and it is often very easy for the government to get a hold of these third party records without your ever being notified.
IMO it's far from clear that emails stored on a third party server would receive constitutional protection under the 4th Amendment if/when this gets to the Supreme Court. There do seem to be some limited statutory protections in place.
An analogy might be postcards. If you send a letter in an envelope the contents enjoy 4th Amendment protections (but the to/from addresses do not). If, on the other hand, you write a postcard, the contents are NOT protected by the 4th Amendment regardless of whether anyone actually reads it because it is exposed to anyone who may look. Similarly, for a plain text email stored on a third party, any employee of the third party with sufficient privileges can look at your email. If this analogy holds, then there's no 4th Amendment protection from such an email. I don't see that it really matters if it's exposed on a physical object or exposed in a file. Ultimately, you decide to hand it over to a third party in a form they can read at which point there's a pretty strong argument you lose the reasonable expectation of privacy.
That said, I think email should be protected. But 4th Amendment protections may not apply and statutory measures are needed.
Another wrinkle is some email providers look at your email as a matter of business for various (advertising, marking spam, etc.) purposes. Would these emails then be protected?
Assume emails would enjoy 4th Amendment protection if the email provider doesn't know the contents. Even if they're only scanning headers, it seems to me there's an argument that the email provider now knows what your headers contain and I'd guess the IRS or other government agencies could glean quite a bit from that as well as who you're sending to and from. If they're scanning the contents as well, are they still protected?
Which may be the crucial difference. But I don't know that it's an open and shut case. Does that make a legal difference? I hope it does.
Tell me: if you gave someone a sealed envelope and asked them to not read the contents -- even though there is absolutely nothing stopping them from tearing open the envelope and reading it -- does that constitute "revealing" the information?
Not exactly the same. It's more akin to sending a telegraph. "Here's this message, in plain text. Give it to this person." Your email provider is given the message in a plainly readable format with no protections (even as flimsy as a sealed envelop).
An ISP has to take positive, affirmative steps to read an email that is stored on their server. Just as someone working for a phone company has to take positive, affirmative steps to access the content of a phone conversation, or your voice mail.
Again, not exactly. The phone company doesn't store a recording of your phone conversations as a matter of course. Your email provider does.
The point here isn't whether it's right (morally, or even legally) for your ISP to turn this over but rather whether it's a violation of the 4th Amendment for the government to receive and use the emails with a warrant. And there's a clear argument that it's not. I don't know the argument would win in court (indeed, it didn't in the 6th Circuit), but it's not settled law across the United States. If it's not protected by the 4th Amendment, any protections are statutory, not Constitutional. And that can lead to seemingly similar things getting treated differently. I don't agree with this line, but the argument exists and I can't dismiss it out of hand.
I'm not an expert on the matter. Are voice mails held to be protected by the 4th Amendment, or are the protected by statute? If it's by statute, then they may well be treated differently than emails, receiving additional protects beyond those constitutionally required.
Why should voice mails be private, yet emails not? Explain please.
That shouldn't be the case. But that doesn't mean it's not the case. It sounds like you're expecting the law to make sense to non-lawyers.
Except in the case when your email is stored on a third party's server. There's quite a bit of case law that you don't have a legal expectation of privacy with regards to information revealed to a third party, e.g. emails stored on a web mail provider's server.
From the EFF (https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/govt/privacy):
"...some Supreme Court cases have held that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information you have "knowingly exposed" to a third party — for example, bank records or records of telephone numbers you have dialed — even if you intended for that third party to keep the information secret. In other words, by engaging in transactions with your bank or communicating phone numbers to your phone company for the purpose of connecting a call, you’ve "assumed the risk" that they will share that information with the government."
It's certainly a reasonable interpretation that you knowingly expose the contents of you email to your provider and so it's not protected by the 4th amendment. Even if you encrypt it, the envelope (from/to addresses, etc.) wouldn't be protected.
And the attempt succeeded. Ok, there were some British soldiers there, too. But the vast majority were French army.
Energy consumption, or electrical energy consumption? Total energy consumption is greater than electrical energy consumption by a pretty big factor (fuel for vehicles, natural gas for heating/cooking, etc.). Wolfram reports annual world electrical consumption of about 20230 TWh or 2.3 TW, which gives about 1/75th.
In how long?
Could be 30 gigawatts for a year, 300 megawatts for a decade, 370 gigawatts for a month or even 16.2 petawatts in a minute.
Units matter!
I think yours is more awkward than the original.
The article states it doesn't cover non-sporting semi-automatic firearms, so it would allow, for example, 3D printing a semiautomatic AR-15 clones. Unless you meet the definitions of a Title 2 firearm (which would include, for example, an AR-15 with a barrel less than 16 inches (406.4 mm) long), sporting purposes really only affect imported shotguns and semiautomatic rifles as well as shotguns in general (they're an exception to the general rule of a bore over 0.50 inches (12.7 mm) being a Title 2 firearm due to sporting purposes).
The basic manufacturer's license allows the manufacture of any non-Title 2 firearm. An additional tax can be paid to allow the manufacture of Title 2 firearms (including short barreled rifles and shotguns, firearms with bores greater than 0.50 inches, etc. but NOT machine guns for anyone but the government).
Once they've allowed your assembly (chartering the corporation) they can't revoke its rights, such as they are.
One other side of this is the right to free of association held to derive from the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech (NAACP v. Alabama). Thus, by SCOTUS precedent, there is a right for people to associate for purposes of speech. I think there is an argument that prohibiting a corporation (or other non-natural person, such as a union) from political speech would be a violation of this right.
This is a case where I can see the basis for the decision but disagree with the outcome.
Nope. Now, I know this is idealistic, but they're supposed to rule for whomever is in the right under the law, not based on who the parties are nor even whether the justices even like the ruling.
Good policies can be unconstitutional just as bad policies can be constitutional. All the SCOTUS should be doing is deciding the constitutionality question, not opining on the value of the policy itself. Obviously, there are some exceptions to this, with the levels of scrutiny, equity opposed to law, etc.
Of course, now they'll start publishing region-specific versions of the texts so the Asian version will have the wrong problem set for North American coursework and prices will increase.
They're not supposed to rule in favor of consumers. Or corporations. They're supposed to rule in "favor" of the law, regardless of which side is popular. The why of a ruling is more important, often, than which side wins and the "right" ruling can be made for the wrong reasons.
Nope. That's the one which prevents the States from doing so. There aren't any limits on the Federal government in the 14th.
Well, except a little bit in section 4, "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void." But, that's hardly germane to this issue. Other than that, it's all restrictions on others than the Federal government (States or persons) or grants of power to the Federal government.
80% isn't bad because there's a selection bias toward cases which are likely to be overturned in cases appealed to the Supreme Court as well as with the Court's decision to grant certiorari. Cases which don't have a chance at getting overturned often either aren't appealed or aren't granted certiorari.
The 9th Circuit's rate of getting overturned by the Supreme Court is not unusual among the circuits. Every year some have a higher rate than the 9th and some lower. They just hear the most cases at the circuit level and generate the most appeals.
All the circuits have a pretty high rate of getting overturned since there's some selection bias in the cases which are appealed to the court. First when deciding to file an appeal since you're not going to unless you think you can win. Second, in granting cert which only occurs when the justice responsible for the circuit thinks there's something to the appeal, else he or she would deny cert.
They may have good reasons to do it, but it's still a reason I won't buy it for various reasons, most importantly, will I still be able to play it in 20 years? I still pull out Civ 2 from time to time, as well as other games from the early-mid 1990s. I don't have any expectation of being able to do the same with titles like this.
So how did Physical Review become prestigious when Annalen der Physik had been around in some form for a century?
An open source journal won't have immediate prestige, but it can gain it as it established a track record of quality.
Which, of course, means every agent within the DHS has the exact same authorities, duties, and powers, or that the paperwork is prepared by agents and not some office staff. Not everyone employee of DHS (or, more particularly, ICE) is an agent. Field agents, like this, may not be able to prepare the paperwork.
An example I know about has to do with another part of DHS, the ATF. Only a small set of examiners in an office in West Virginia can approve transfers of Title 2 firearms (machine guns, silencers, etc.). The ATF agent in your local office can't.
This could well be a similar situation and, from the information provided, we don't know.
I don't see anywhere in the article the agent filled out the form, just that DHS prepared the form.
The agency didn't, or the agent, who it's possible doesn't have the authority to correct errors? I usually find in these sorts of stories a lot of relevant information isn't reported.
So, "confiscation" is the correct term, then? He didn't sign the form to get the boat out of customs impound so they couldn't release it to him.
This sound like another occurrence of true vs. right answers: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/the-true-answer-and-the-right-answer/