Even though Obama is a fucking Constitutional lawyer, I believe.
The purpose of being a Constitutional lawyer is to perform mental gymnastics creating exceptions to clearly-stated language such as "shall not infringe" and "shall make no law".
Easier way to avoid such things, look for people who use the word "sheeple", then disregard everything else they say.
Replying to them and making it twice as visible that the word was used, does not further your cause. It does, however, let you show us that you're so much better and holier than them.
I don't like or agree with every term that everyone uses all the time myself. I just don't bitch about it. I don't tell others how they should express themselves because that's worse than any word they could use, and because I am not their lord and master. The only person I want to control is myself.
That this particular term "sheeple" gets so deeply and visibly under the skin of so many tells me something. It tells me that this word has power, that it's significant, that it must in fact do a very good job of connecting an ugly tendency with an ugly word. "Follower", "lemming", "droid", "trendy", "mindless automaton" etc. all describe the same thing, but for some reason it is the word "sheeple" that so many I'm-better-than-you types fixate on. That's all the more reason to use it.
I don't get it. What does free speech have to do with censoring comments on a website? He seemed to be talking about government censorship being bad, and then he said that.
If you believe that censorship is fundamentally wrong then you have two choices: 1) Be a hypocrite and pretend it's different when you do it, or 2) don't censor content on your own Web site either. This KWin maintainer is choosing the first option. What he doesn't seem to appreciate is easy enough to understand: if the trolls can cause him to abandon one of his core beliefs and make a hypocrite of himself, then that's a victory for the trolls and a defeat for himself. It reminds me of how certain nations respond to terrorism by eliminating freedoms -- if the terrorists want to do as much lasting harm as possible, then they must be delighted by that.
This near-obsession with treating government as a special case even when the discussion is about abstract principles is why you were confused. Government is only a special case when the discussion is about censorship via the legal system, because government is the only entity legally allowed to use force or threat of force to achieve its goals. A Web site operator isn't going to arrest a troll and throw him in jail so that just doesn't apply here. Said operator might, however, delete certain posts or ban certain users to effect censorship.
I think our society in general is losing the ability to think in terms of abstract principles (part of why privacy is eroding). This is why we have to rehash the same old "but but.. government!" discussion every single time censorship is mentioned regardless of context. It's a nearly indestructible meme it would seem. You will probably be fired if you tell your boss to go fuck himself and that, too, is a form of censorship. Anyway, this is like a GPL vs. BSD license discussion -- check the Slashdot archives and you'll find that every conceivable point and counterpoint has already been debated ad nauseum.
If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.
Except that nothing was stolen. It is like downloading a movie. Copying is not stealing. Countries spy on each other, friend or foe. It is normal and expected.
That's a fine job of redundantly restating my sentence while also pointing out the obvious.
I think you miss his point. Homosexuality is ancillary to the problem it was just an example, it's that something- anything- could be discovered and used against the politician or anyone else for that matter.
That's the problem with this media-driven urge to view the entire world through the lens of group identity. It becomes a fixation, and people who allow their thought process to be a product of media will miss your clearly-stated point because of it.
>When the day comes that this information is obtained and used against the same politicians who voted for it, it will be some delicious comeuppance.
I really don't think you quite get how that day would work.
"Senator, PRISM has discovered an email of you admitting to having a gay lover in college, something that would make you completely unelectable in this country for some reason."
"Ahh. Johnny Ten Inches. Yes, well, I admit to that. How much is it going to cost for this to go away?"
"We have all the money we need, but it would sure be nice if that new NSA data seizure legislation in the pipeline got a yes vote. #211,944 if I recall."
"#211,944? I'm not familiar with it."
"Of course you aren't, senator. We haven't written it yet."
You are describing authorized use by those officials who have access to the system.
We were talking about unauthorized use by outside attackers who manage to compromise said system. The post to which I replied spelled this out explicitly and I quoted that in my own post.
So, setting aside all the potential evils that will absolutely certainly occur because of politicians and career bureaucrats having the data, throw in the random security breach by insiders, contractors, script kiddies, whatever.
When the day comes that this information is obtained and used against the same politicians who voted for it, it will be some delicious comeuppance. And better than they deserve.
And a minor observation. From the fine summary:
an anonymous reader links to a story at The Guardian about some good old fashioned friendly interception
It's funny the way they phrase things when governments are involved. If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.
You should read my comment again, because your reply is essentially repeating what my post said to begin with. Do people treat security poorly in the IT industry, yes. Can security be strengthened by more rigid standards and harsher penalties for failure, yes.
What I responded to, and I'll quote it again, was "Cyber espionage, crime, and warfare are possible only because of poor application or system design, implementation, and/or configuration." The implication here is that these things are NOT possible if systems are not poorly designed, implemented and configured. That's a load of bullshit. even with the best security advancements available you are simply not immune. To suggest otherwise is to display ignorance on the subject.
Would you concede that (say, by using managed languages) eliminating all buffer overflows would be a huge step in the right direction? We have the capability of doing that. There is still the impossibility of ever conclusively proving that a given piece of software is completely free of all possible bugs, but that's a lofty and unrealistic goal. There are many feasible steps we could take that are realistic. We generally don't take those steps because the trade-offs involved don't fit our priorities. They usually mean more effort and therefore more expense, but government is the one institution that does not need to make a profit.
Referring to your original post, there is a huge difference between "this doctor is incompetent and is guilty of malpractice" versus "cure all diseases all the time". I am essentially agreeing with you, except I think that with the latter case, you're going to an absurd extreme that no one is realistically suggesting. That was my point.
The whole idea that China should be 'held responsible' for the hacking is just plain silly on it's face. Governments and private corporations have been spying on each other ever since the first cave man tried to keep a secret.
It's a form of sabre-rattling. Although, it is useful to note the difference between spying as in passive information gathering, versus something intended to cause material damage like Stuxnet. The latter actually is a form of attack.
Can you imagine during the cold war of the US President went to Stalin and said "please stop spying on us"? Because that's exactly what's been suggested here.
I imagine the Soviets were pissed off about this one.
The Trans-Siberian Pipeline, as planned, would have a level of complexity that would require advanced automated control software, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA). The pipeline used plans for a sophisticated control system and its software that had been stolen from a Canadian firm by the KGB. The CIA allegedly had the company insert a logic bomb in the program for sabotage purposes, eventually resulting in an explosion with the power of three kilotons of TNT.
That's quite a bit more destructive than merely learning unauthorized information.
Do you expect automotive engineers to be able to build mechanically perfect vehicles? No.
Vehicles that never fail? No. Vehicles that have a reasonable failure mode? Yes.
Consider the air brakes on a tractor trailer. The air is what keeps the brakes apart. If some mechanical failure caused a loss of air pressure, the failure mode would be stopping the vehicle. That is acceptable. If they did it the other way, with the air pressure being used to apply the brakes, the first sign of failure could be the inability to stop the vehicle at highway speed. That is not acceptable.
Either way, it's not a question of perfection. It's a question of expecting failure. The principle applies to software as well.
Meeting people online is better with respect to the fact that _petty_ initial-impression-based perceptions that may have pushed you away from someone you saw IRL, yet didn't matter in the long term, won't hold you back from experiencing the companionship of a unique person who has qualities that you would have overlooked, had you looked upon them in person, initialy.
Assuming one is shallow, inexperienced, or quick to judge, then yes that is true. But did you want to be with someone who has that much emotional growing up to do?
Sadly what you described is the majority. That makes it easy to forget that not everyone operates that way.
There is a difference between laws designed to regulate availability of material goods and laws designed to punish human beings.
Exactly. Politicians just love that former category, precisely because it never works. It never works and never solves the problem, so there is always a menacing problem they can promise to do something about the next time they campaign. It also has the side-effect of requiring a police state to have even a slight hope of enforcement, which again is great from the perspective of most politicians.
Politicians know the War on Drugs doesn't stop people from acquiring drugs. They know that mass shootings overwhelmingly tend to happen in "gun free" zones. They know even an outright ban on guns doesn't stop criminals from acquiring them. They know someone not afraid of a murder charge isn't going to be deterred by a weapons violation. They probably know that the USA has one of the highest murder rates of the industralized world... unless you exclude Chicago and a few other cities where it is practically impossible to legally own a firearm; then the USA has one of the lowest. They understand all of this.
They are interested in perpetuating the problems. It's what wins elections. It's what makes people increasingly feel they need government intervention. It's fun to think of them as a bunch of morons who couldn't find their ass in the dark, but this is called allowing sentiment to interfere with judgment.
If it is trivial why do they put so much effort into squishing it?
Did you ever consider it in terms of strategy? Companies try to use strategy instead of lazily waiting until the last minute to passively react the way so many individuals do.
It's trivial now but that could change. They are taking steps to keep it trivial and/or to make it more so. If they neglected it entirely, it might become a very large, entrenched, difficult-to-eliminate market by the time they get around to reacting to it. What would really entrench a used-games market with no artificial restrictions? That's easy: for it to be common and perceived as normal by the average customer, something they come to expect, something they would be outraged about if it were taken away.
The game companies don't want that to happen. They're smart, so they think of these things ahead of time. They're greedy control freaks, but they're not stupid.
Do yourself a favor and apply this strategic view to every action corporations and politicians take and to every word they say. The world will become mostly predictable then.
The 180-day limit is based on an antiquated legal standard, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 1986 - more than 25 years ago. At the time, email was still in its infancy, and "cloud"-based email providers like Yahoo, GMail, etc. simply didn't exist.
Efforts are underway to update the act so that, among other things, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant anytime they want to access email. But those updates aren't law yet, so the old statute still applies.
That old statute outweighs the Fourth Amendment? Interesting.
What is a trained drug-sniffing dog, if it is not a (living) device for the sole purpose of performing a search? Using a dog to search your home or your car is not fundamentally different from the cop just using his hands and his eyes to search the same places. Yet the dog gives a cue and *poof* there goes your Fourth Amendment.
Of course they have to have such a loophole to keep up the War on (some) Drugs. A war on drugs (really a war on personal freedom) simply couldn't be conducted by the federal government under a reasonable reading of the Constitution. So we're losing some of our more precious rights and freedoms in exchange for being able to ineffectively tell other people how they should live. What a bargain.
I host my own email server, so unless they know who sent it or who received it, my server could experience a catastrophic failure should the need arise...
They always told you to make backups, but you never listened. Damn, what a tragedy.
The term "house" is specifically used in the text of the 4th Amendment, and courts have basically ruled that this term refers to your home, whether that's a building you own or a single room in a shared apartment...essentially your "personal living space", where a polite person would be required to ask permission to enter. On the other hand, the e-mail on the server is no different from you giving your personal papers to any random third party, mostly regardless of the relationship, with a few exceptions.
Yes, because if the standard were the other way around, people would have too much privacy and obviously that would bring society to its knees!
I think the difference is that the case law pertaining to your dwelling was established long ago, back when people thought the USA was special, back when the USA would ridicule many other nations of the world for treating their citizens more like subjects who had no rights, only privileges. Electronic communications were invented long after the US government became something much more sad and typical, interested only in the expansion of its own power via the flimsiest claims to legitimacy.
<sarcasm>Because as we all know, anyone familiar with people like Thomas Jefferson would immediately understand that the Founders really did mean only physical hardcopy paperwork. Obviously, these men who wanted The People to be respected and left alone by their government when it came to things like postal letters and private notes definitely wanted The People's privacy completely trampled should any new medium of written communication come along. Duh.</sarcasm>
Just think, some of the Founders were opposed to having a Bill of Rights at all because they feared that other rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution would be overlooked!
It seems that a key tenet of authoritarianism is the assumption that privacy is not legitimate.
Without the information provided by putting that into practice, it would be much more difficult to micromanage daily life. An income tax in particular is a control freak's wet dream: it provides both carrots and sticks that can be used to manipulate behavior. Unlike impersonal excise taxes or sales taxes, where the only relevant information is a dollar amount, an income tax inherently requires getting to know the mundane details of a person's life. You have to know who they are, what they do, what they've been up to lately, and you need invasive powers to make sure they aren't cheating or otherwise lying to you.
There is a reason why the Constitution had to be amended to allow for an income tax. As far as I know, that reason wasn't because the Founding Fathers never heard of such a concept.
Obviously, the American people are A ok with this as it's been going on for a while now. Nobody's proposing a new plan or ECPA at that. Then again, the state of cyber law in the US is a joke full of loopholes and free passes. The real question is do you blame the IRS for doing what it legally can to function as an entity, or the people for allowing it?
There is plenty of blame to go around.
What I don't understand is this idea that the Fourth Amendment applies to one communications channel (say, postal mail) but not other communications channels (e-mail) that achieve the same transfer of information. I say the burden of proof is on those who assert this. What's the rationale here?
That would also make the contracts much more expensive, meaning that more tax needs to be collected to fulfill them, harming local business. Basically, it is the broken window fallacy.
Sadly, taxes have had no real relationship to the government's need for revenue (spending, interest on dets) for a very long time now. I don't think that necessarily argues against your idea, but it does complicate it.
He knew they were moving large amount of money. That is it.
Right now I have a couple grand in my wallet, am I suddenly some sort of criminal?
My brother repaid a loan that I made him. I will either deposit this money or put it in my safe. If I put it in my safe am I suddenly some sort of drug lord?
In the (greedy) eyes of the law, quite possibly. Sure, your brother just repaid that loan, but sadly that doesn't mean that the cops won't seize that cash until you convince a judge that you're not a drug dealer. "Asset forfeiture" hits crooks and innocent people alike. I don't like it either, but try convincing your legislator and you'll just get some crap about "balancing liberty with the need to stop drugs, mmmkay?"
Most of the unreasonable bullshit comes from trying to make a crime out of things that are not crimes (what consenting adults do). It leads to laws that would be unenforcable without this police-state mentality. Rather than admit that such laws are inherently flawed, and repeal them, the government would rather expand its powers.
The problem was, they wanted to accept them in their own way on their own schedule.
Then I submit that they were not really so willing to accept new cosmological theories.
The correct way is according to the evidence. The correct schedule is according to when advancements are made and new evidence is discovered. Anything else is unwillingness and refusal.
Who was it that said "scientific progress advances one death at a time"? A scientist, no?
Yes, and it was a lament.
But really, how much rapid progress would you have expected from an organization which believed (at the time) that an effective way to spread the love of Jesus was torturing people to death? I mean, I've read the Bible and the words of Christ -- I couldn't find "hold an Inquisition" or "torture your neighbor" anywhere in it.
The problem was, they wanted to accept them in their own way on their own schedule.
Then I submit that they were not really so willing to accept new cosmological theories.
The correct way is according to the evidence. The correct schedule is according to when advancements are made and new evidence is discovered. Anything else is unwillingness and refusal.
The kids in the public education system might turn out to be pretty decent Jeopardy players; that is, if they don't forget everything they 'learned' a year after graduating from high school...
Jeopardy... I never did understand how "Popular Culture" belonged with things like History, Astronomy, and the like. Because people who learn about astrophysics are truly concerned about what Snookie is up to these days? I say leave that kind of information where it belongs: among the small-minded.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though Obama is a fucking Constitutional lawyer, I believe.
The purpose of being a Constitutional lawyer is to perform mental gymnastics creating exceptions to clearly-stated language such as "shall not infringe" and "shall make no law".
Easier way to avoid such things, look for people who use the word "sheeple", then disregard everything else they say.
Replying to them and making it twice as visible that the word was used, does not further your cause. It does, however, let you show us that you're so much better and holier than them.
I don't like or agree with every term that everyone uses all the time myself. I just don't bitch about it. I don't tell others how they should express themselves because that's worse than any word they could use, and because I am not their lord and master. The only person I want to control is myself.
That this particular term "sheeple" gets so deeply and visibly under the skin of so many tells me something. It tells me that this word has power, that it's significant, that it must in fact do a very good job of connecting an ugly tendency with an ugly word. "Follower", "lemming", "droid", "trendy", "mindless automaton" etc. all describe the same thing, but for some reason it is the word "sheeple" that so many I'm-better-than-you types fixate on. That's all the more reason to use it.
I don't get it. What does free speech have to do with censoring comments on a website? He seemed to be talking about government censorship being bad, and then he said that.
If you believe that censorship is fundamentally wrong then you have two choices: 1) Be a hypocrite and pretend it's different when you do it, or 2) don't censor content on your own Web site either. This KWin maintainer is choosing the first option. What he doesn't seem to appreciate is easy enough to understand: if the trolls can cause him to abandon one of his core beliefs and make a hypocrite of himself, then that's a victory for the trolls and a defeat for himself. It reminds me of how certain nations respond to terrorism by eliminating freedoms -- if the terrorists want to do as much lasting harm as possible, then they must be delighted by that.
.. government!" discussion every single time censorship is mentioned regardless of context. It's a nearly indestructible meme it would seem. You will probably be fired if you tell your boss to go fuck himself and that, too, is a form of censorship. Anyway, this is like a GPL vs. BSD license discussion -- check the Slashdot archives and you'll find that every conceivable point and counterpoint has already been debated ad nauseum.
This near-obsession with treating government as a special case even when the discussion is about abstract principles is why you were confused. Government is only a special case when the discussion is about censorship via the legal system, because government is the only entity legally allowed to use force or threat of force to achieve its goals. A Web site operator isn't going to arrest a troll and throw him in jail so that just doesn't apply here. Said operator might, however, delete certain posts or ban certain users to effect censorship.
I think our society in general is losing the ability to think in terms of abstract principles (part of why privacy is eroding). This is why we have to rehash the same old "but but
If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.
Except that nothing was stolen. It is like downloading a movie. Copying is not stealing. Countries spy on each other, friend or foe. It is normal and expected.
That's a fine job of redundantly restating my sentence while also pointing out the obvious.
I think you miss his point. Homosexuality is ancillary to the problem it was just an example, it's that something- anything- could be discovered and used against the politician or anyone else for that matter.
That's the problem with this media-driven urge to view the entire world through the lens of group identity. It becomes a fixation, and people who allow their thought process to be a product of media will miss your clearly-stated point because of it.
>When the day comes that this information is obtained and used against the same politicians who voted for it, it will be some delicious comeuppance.
I really don't think you quite get how that day would work.
"Senator, PRISM has discovered an email of you admitting to having a gay lover in college, something that would make you completely unelectable in this country for some reason."
"Ahh. Johnny Ten Inches. Yes, well, I admit to that. How much is it going to cost for this to go away?"
"We have all the money we need, but it would sure be nice if that new NSA data seizure legislation in the pipeline got a yes vote. #211,944 if I recall."
"#211,944? I'm not familiar with it."
"Of course you aren't, senator. We haven't written it yet."
You are describing authorized use by those officials who have access to the system.
We were talking about unauthorized use by outside attackers who manage to compromise said system. The post to which I replied spelled this out explicitly and I quoted that in my own post.
See how simple that is?
So, setting aside all the potential evils that will absolutely certainly occur because of politicians and career bureaucrats having the data, throw in the random security breach by insiders, contractors, script kiddies, whatever.
When the day comes that this information is obtained and used against the same politicians who voted for it, it will be some delicious comeuppance. And better than they deserve. And a minor observation. From the fine summary:
an anonymous reader links to a story at The Guardian about some good old fashioned friendly interception
It's funny the way they phrase things when governments are involved. If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.
You should read my comment again, because your reply is essentially repeating what my post said to begin with. Do people treat security poorly in the IT industry, yes. Can security be strengthened by more rigid standards and harsher penalties for failure, yes.
What I responded to, and I'll quote it again, was "Cyber espionage, crime, and warfare are possible only because of poor application or system design, implementation, and/or configuration." The implication here is that these things are NOT possible if systems are not poorly designed, implemented and configured. That's a load of bullshit. even with the best security advancements available you are simply not immune. To suggest otherwise is to display ignorance on the subject.
Would you concede that (say, by using managed languages) eliminating all buffer overflows would be a huge step in the right direction? We have the capability of doing that. There is still the impossibility of ever conclusively proving that a given piece of software is completely free of all possible bugs, but that's a lofty and unrealistic goal. There are many feasible steps we could take that are realistic. We generally don't take those steps because the trade-offs involved don't fit our priorities. They usually mean more effort and therefore more expense, but government is the one institution that does not need to make a profit.
Referring to your original post, there is a huge difference between "this doctor is incompetent and is guilty of malpractice" versus "cure all diseases all the time". I am essentially agreeing with you, except I think that with the latter case, you're going to an absurd extreme that no one is realistically suggesting. That was my point.
The whole idea that China should be 'held responsible' for the hacking is just plain silly on it's face. Governments and private corporations have been spying on each other ever since the first cave man tried to keep a secret.
It's a form of sabre-rattling. Although, it is useful to note the difference between spying as in passive information gathering, versus something intended to cause material damage like Stuxnet. The latter actually is a form of attack.
Can you imagine during the cold war of the US President went to Stalin and said "please stop spying on us"? Because that's exactly what's been suggested here.
I imagine the Soviets were pissed off about this one.
The Trans-Siberian Pipeline, as planned, would have a level of complexity that would require advanced automated control software, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA). The pipeline used plans for a sophisticated control system and its software that had been stolen from a Canadian firm by the KGB. The CIA allegedly had the company insert a logic bomb in the program for sabotage purposes, eventually resulting in an explosion with the power of three kilotons of TNT.
That's quite a bit more destructive than merely learning unauthorized information.
Do you expect automotive engineers to be able to build mechanically perfect vehicles? No.
Vehicles that never fail? No. Vehicles that have a reasonable failure mode? Yes.
Consider the air brakes on a tractor trailer. The air is what keeps the brakes apart. If some mechanical failure caused a loss of air pressure, the failure mode would be stopping the vehicle. That is acceptable. If they did it the other way, with the air pressure being used to apply the brakes, the first sign of failure could be the inability to stop the vehicle at highway speed. That is not acceptable.
Either way, it's not a question of perfection. It's a question of expecting failure. The principle applies to software as well.
Meeting people online is better with respect to the fact that _petty_ initial-impression-based perceptions that may have pushed you away from someone you saw IRL, yet didn't matter in the long term, won't hold you back from experiencing the companionship of a unique person who has qualities that you would have overlooked, had you looked upon them in person, initialy.
Assuming one is shallow, inexperienced, or quick to judge, then yes that is true. But did you want to be with someone who has that much emotional growing up to do?
Sadly what you described is the majority. That makes it easy to forget that not everyone operates that way.
There is a difference between laws designed to regulate availability of material goods and laws designed to punish human beings.
Exactly. Politicians just love that former category, precisely because it never works. It never works and never solves the problem, so there is always a menacing problem they can promise to do something about the next time they campaign. It also has the side-effect of requiring a police state to have even a slight hope of enforcement, which again is great from the perspective of most politicians.
... unless you exclude Chicago and a few other cities where it is practically impossible to legally own a firearm; then the USA has one of the lowest. They understand all of this.
Politicians know the War on Drugs doesn't stop people from acquiring drugs. They know that mass shootings overwhelmingly tend to happen in "gun free" zones. They know even an outright ban on guns doesn't stop criminals from acquiring them. They know someone not afraid of a murder charge isn't going to be deterred by a weapons violation. They probably know that the USA has one of the highest murder rates of the industralized world
They are interested in perpetuating the problems. It's what wins elections. It's what makes people increasingly feel they need government intervention. It's fun to think of them as a bunch of morons who couldn't find their ass in the dark, but this is called allowing sentiment to interfere with judgment.
That coupled with "zero tolerance" which equates to "no thinking by staff" we are ruining a generation of kids.
At least we are teaching them that those with authority and political power are not to be trusted.
If it is trivial why do they put so much effort into squishing it?
Did you ever consider it in terms of strategy? Companies try to use strategy instead of lazily waiting until the last minute to passively react the way so many individuals do.
It's trivial now but that could change. They are taking steps to keep it trivial and/or to make it more so. If they neglected it entirely, it might become a very large, entrenched, difficult-to-eliminate market by the time they get around to reacting to it. What would really entrench a used-games market with no artificial restrictions? That's easy: for it to be common and perceived as normal by the average customer, something they come to expect, something they would be outraged about if it were taken away.
The game companies don't want that to happen. They're smart, so they think of these things ahead of time. They're greedy control freaks, but they're not stupid.
Do yourself a favor and apply this strategic view to every action corporations and politicians take and to every word they say. The world will become mostly predictable then.
The 180-day limit is based on an antiquated legal standard, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 1986 - more than 25 years ago. At the time, email was still in its infancy, and "cloud"-based email providers like Yahoo, GMail, etc. simply didn't exist. Efforts are underway to update the act so that, among other things, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant anytime they want to access email. But those updates aren't law yet, so the old statute still applies.
That old statute outweighs the Fourth Amendment? Interesting.
The drug-dog loophole certainly is convenient.
What is a trained drug-sniffing dog, if it is not a (living) device for the sole purpose of performing a search? Using a dog to search your home or your car is not fundamentally different from the cop just using his hands and his eyes to search the same places. Yet the dog gives a cue and *poof* there goes your Fourth Amendment.
Of course they have to have such a loophole to keep up the War on (some) Drugs. A war on drugs (really a war on personal freedom) simply couldn't be conducted by the federal government under a reasonable reading of the Constitution. So we're losing some of our more precious rights and freedoms in exchange for being able to ineffectively tell other people how they should live. What a bargain.
I host my own email server, so unless they know who sent it or who received it, my server could experience a catastrophic failure should the need arise...
They always told you to make backups, but you never listened. Damn, what a tragedy.
The term "house" is specifically used in the text of the 4th Amendment, and courts have basically ruled that this term refers to your home, whether that's a building you own or a single room in a shared apartment...essentially your "personal living space", where a polite person would be required to ask permission to enter. On the other hand, the e-mail on the server is no different from you giving your personal papers to any random third party, mostly regardless of the relationship, with a few exceptions.
Yes, because if the standard were the other way around, people would have too much privacy and obviously that would bring society to its knees!
I think the difference is that the case law pertaining to your dwelling was established long ago, back when people thought the USA was special, back when the USA would ridicule many other nations of the world for treating their citizens more like subjects who had no rights, only privileges. Electronic communications were invented long after the US government became something much more sad and typical, interested only in the expansion of its own power via the flimsiest claims to legitimacy.
<sarcasm>Because as we all know, anyone familiar with people like Thomas Jefferson would immediately understand that the Founders really did mean only physical hardcopy paperwork. Obviously, these men who wanted The People to be respected and left alone by their government when it came to things like postal letters and private notes definitely wanted The People's privacy completely trampled should any new medium of written communication come along. Duh.</sarcasm>
Just think, some of the Founders were opposed to having a Bill of Rights at all because they feared that other rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution would be overlooked!
It seems that a key tenet of authoritarianism is the assumption that privacy is not legitimate.
Without the information provided by putting that into practice, it would be much more difficult to micromanage daily life. An income tax in particular is a control freak's wet dream: it provides both carrots and sticks that can be used to manipulate behavior. Unlike impersonal excise taxes or sales taxes, where the only relevant information is a dollar amount, an income tax inherently requires getting to know the mundane details of a person's life. You have to know who they are, what they do, what they've been up to lately, and you need invasive powers to make sure they aren't cheating or otherwise lying to you.
There is a reason why the Constitution had to be amended to allow for an income tax. As far as I know, that reason wasn't because the Founding Fathers never heard of such a concept.
Obviously, the American people are A ok with this as it's been going on for a while now. Nobody's proposing a new plan or ECPA at that. Then again, the state of cyber law in the US is a joke full of loopholes and free passes. The real question is do you blame the IRS for doing what it legally can to function as an entity, or the people for allowing it?
There is plenty of blame to go around.
What I don't understand is this idea that the Fourth Amendment applies to one communications channel (say, postal mail) but not other communications channels (e-mail) that achieve the same transfer of information. I say the burden of proof is on those who assert this. What's the rationale here?
That would also make the contracts much more expensive, meaning that more tax needs to be collected to fulfill them, harming local business. Basically, it is the broken window fallacy.
Sadly, taxes have had no real relationship to the government's need for revenue (spending, interest on dets) for a very long time now. I don't think that necessarily argues against your idea, but it does complicate it.
Since when is money an illegal good?
He knew they were moving large amount of money. That is it.
Right now I have a couple grand in my wallet, am I suddenly some sort of criminal?
My brother repaid a loan that I made him. I will either deposit this money or put it in my safe. If I put it in my safe am I suddenly some sort of drug lord?
In the (greedy) eyes of the law, quite possibly. Sure, your brother just repaid that loan, but sadly that doesn't mean that the cops won't seize that cash until you convince a judge that you're not a drug dealer. "Asset forfeiture" hits crooks and innocent people alike. I don't like it either, but try convincing your legislator and you'll just get some crap about "balancing liberty with the need to stop drugs, mmmkay?"
Most of the unreasonable bullshit comes from trying to make a crime out of things that are not crimes (what consenting adults do). It leads to laws that would be unenforcable without this police-state mentality. Rather than admit that such laws are inherently flawed, and repeal them, the government would rather expand its powers.
The problem was, they wanted to accept them in their own way on their own schedule.
Then I submit that they were not really so willing to accept new cosmological theories.
The correct way is according to the evidence. The correct schedule is according to when advancements are made and new evidence is discovered. Anything else is unwillingness and refusal.
Who was it that said "scientific progress advances one death at a time"? A scientist, no?
Yes, and it was a lament.
But really, how much rapid progress would you have expected from an organization which believed (at the time) that an effective way to spread the love of Jesus was torturing people to death? I mean, I've read the Bible and the words of Christ -- I couldn't find "hold an Inquisition" or "torture your neighbor" anywhere in it.
The problem was, they wanted to accept them in their own way on their own schedule.
Then I submit that they were not really so willing to accept new cosmological theories.
The correct way is according to the evidence. The correct schedule is according to when advancements are made and new evidence is discovered. Anything else is unwillingness and refusal.
The kids in the public education system might turn out to be pretty decent Jeopardy players; that is, if they don't forget everything they 'learned' a year after graduating from high school...
Jeopardy... I never did understand how "Popular Culture" belonged with things like History, Astronomy, and the like. Because people who learn about astrophysics are truly concerned about what Snookie is up to these days? I say leave that kind of information where it belongs: among the small-minded.
Seemed like a poorly-executed ratings grab to me.