full-disclosure - Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove

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Date: Tue Dec 27 23:46:28 2005
From: kurt.buff at gmail.com (Kurt Buff)
Subject: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove

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

Yes, subject to a) A proper search warrant and b) The commercial
agreements between the provider of the medium and the user of the medium.

> 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.  

Those rights are a matter of negotiation between the provider of the
medium and the sender of the traffic over the medium. Caveat emptor, and
all that.

> 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?

Depends on how good your encryption is, and what the governing contracts
are.

> 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.

Ideas are nothing unless they have physical expression - they are not
things. You can think all you want, but until you express your ideas in
some fashion (speech or more concrete action) your ideas are null.

> 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. 

As do I. So what? As I said above, it depends on how good your
encryption is.

> 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?

Because they have more guns than we do, and tend to use them badly and
without just cause - perhaps "Consent of the governed" rings a bell?