Message-ID: <43B1CDB8.5010009@pdx.edu>
Date: Tue Dec 27 23:27:01 2005
From: piercede at pdx.edu (Dean Pierce)
Subject: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove

Does the fourth amendment really guarantee us the right to pass any
information through any medium, and assume that it is still considered
private?

The problem is that privacy and freedom (I believe) are mutually
exclusive.  If we are granted total privacy in our communications
systems, then that must, by definition, infringe on the freedoms of
whoever owns the mediums.  The argument goes back even farther to the
ideas of intellectual property.  Does your data transmission really
belong to you?  If someone copies it, do all the copies still belong to you?

The way I see it, there are two things, stuff, and ideas.  I believe
that the fourth amendment protects all of my stuff, but not my ideas.
In fact, I believe that the first amendment ensures my right to
duplicate and retransmit ideas.

If I send data to my local router, then whoever owns that router now has
total access to my data.  Expecting anything else is just naive.  If I
encrypt the data with my friends public key, however, the person who
owns that router only has access to an encrypted block of data, which is
largely (but still finitely) safe.

I feel that any given three letter agency has the right to record
whatever they see come in through their lines, even if transmission to
them was not intentional.  Notice that we also have the right to listen
to open conversations, and to sniff on open networks, and even keep
databases of what we learn, so why should we deny a government agency
the same right?

   - DEAN

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