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? _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
