Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove
From: Kurt Buff <kurt.buff () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2005 15:43:23 -0800
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/
Current thread:
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, (continued)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Bipin Gautam (Dec 26)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove J.A. Terranson (Dec 26)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Leif Ericksen (Dec 26)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove obnoxious (Dec 26)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Leif Ericksen (Dec 26)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Rodrigo Barbosa (Dec 26)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Kurt Buff (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Paul Schmehl (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Benjamin Franz (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Dean Pierce (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Kurt Buff (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Gary E. Miller (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Paul Schmehl (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Rodrigo Barbosa (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Leif Ericksen (Dec 26)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove coderman (Dec 27)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Leif Ericksen (Dec 28)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Rodrigo Barbosa (Dec 28)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Leif Ericksen (Dec 28)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Rodrigo Barbosa (Dec 28)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove Stan Bubrouski (Dec 28)
- Re: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove and other tales Steve Kudlak (Dec 28)