EFF Fights for Answers About Massive Government Phone Database
eff.org
eff.org
More to the point, as it relates to the DEA and local narco units - they do illegal stuff all the time and if historic meta-data was made available to the public, heads would roll.
Since there are degrees of privacy, "not private" for the purposes of the 4th amendment doesn't necessarily mean "totally public." The line that has been drawn is that if information is "not private" enough to share with your thousand closest friends at AT&T, it's "not private" enough for the government to see it without a warrant.
With regards to meta-data, you don't even have to get into the whole expectation of privacy inquiry. It's not even your data, it's AT&T's data. The 4th amendment explicitly states that people will be secure in their houses, persons, papers, and effects. That implies ownership or at least control. But call metadata is AT&T's property; the digital records are their papers, generated by their computers, for their internal purposes. If it were up to you, you probably wouldn't even want those records to exist, but they do, because they're not yours.
Regardless of where you draw the line on public versus private, it's clear you cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy in someone else's property.
Don't get me wrong: I wish Congress would pass a law requiring telecoms to erase such data immediately, keeping only aggregate data for billing purposes. But the Constitution says what it says, not what you want it to say.
Or take another path to VOIP - when your call passes AT&T's servers, if they log the bits, are they then AT&T's?
Basically, if information passed to and logged by AT&T is their data, then it applies to everything passing AT&T's servers, and call content would not require a warrant either. In reverse, if there is an expectation of privacy of call data, there can/may/should be an expectation of privacy in metadata as well.
It's clear that meta-data is being used in ways that compromise generally expected forms of privacy.
The very fact you're against making all meta-data public provides evidence of this.
Claiming the meta-data belongs to AT&T is false, since the data is generated by the users actions, not AT&T; it's like saying the phone number belongs to them, which we both know is not true.
Please explain why you feel it'd be illegal to follow you or have you followed in public, watch your front door, etc.
This is completely, and I mean completely different. There's no expectation of privacy in a 7-11. As such, the two situations are incomparable despite their superficial similarity.
Whether there's an expectation of privacy online is unclear, and the government is trying to capitalize on this by setting a precedent.
1) The "expectation of privacy" must be objectively reasonable. It's objectively true that phone call records are not private: they are kept by the phone company in the ordinary course of business and many people have access to them. As a purely factual matter, a lot more people (people who, unlike the 7-11 clerk, you've never even met!) have access to your data at a phone company than at a 7-11. So any subjective belief that those details are private is not objectively reasonable.
2) Callers have no ownership or control over call records. Even if you don't subscribe to the "property rights" view of the 4th amendment, you have to admit that it's less reasonable to have an expectation of privacy in something someone else owns and controls. It's not reasonable to expect privacy as to a 7-11's recordings of what you do on its premises because they own the recordings and control the premises. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect privacy as to AT&T's records of what you do on its telephone network.
Why am I not surprised that our laws are underpinned by a paradox.
> It's objectively true that phone call records are not private
By this standard, is anything private? If I have a home security system run by a third party, does that mean my front door is not private because I share it with ADT? Maybe instead of getting a warrant LEOs can request ADT to unlock the front door.
> you have to admit that it's less reasonable to have an expectation of privacy in something someone else owns and controls
My phone is controlled by apple. My car is controlled by on-star. My money is controlled by visa. It sounds like the only reasonable expectation to privacy is in your own brain.. for now.
My question is, why limit dragnet surveillance to only metadata? It seems arbitrary to not also record full transcripts -- if we really don't have any expectation to privacy.
The difference is that phone companies don't record full transcripts. Just like my kinect isn't recording my room right now. That's why I have a reasonable expectation of privacy even though there is a kinect in the room.
But I don't have an expectation that the requests I make to xbox is private.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/penta...
> Specifically, Petraeus acknowledged providing eight notebooks containing highly classified material to his biographer, Paula Broadwell, in the waning days of his Army career.
And yet
> In April, after a lengthy investigation by the FBI that disgraced the onetime military hero, Petraeus pleaded guilty in federal court in North Carolina to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified materials. He was sentenced to two years of probation and fined $100,000.
And I don't understand your example at all, as it argues in my favor. Starbucks is generally regarded as having no expectation of privacy.
Questions relates to how tech has changed this and it's clear it has.
Until there's one set of rules for expectations related to privacy, it will be exploited by anyone able to do so.
It seems untenable to me that all rights to privacy in our metadata are entirely subverted by their being owned by telecom companies. It's not as if I'm arguing that warrantless access to metadata is a good thing. But there must be a better argument than "this feels wrong".