FBI chief Comey: “We have never had absolute privacy”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The FBI used to have to go in person to set wiretaps, to steal documents, to access a safe deposit box. Now they can do it from miles away, and despite what Comey implies, they can do it without a warrant.
I'd like to imagine a future where citizens would have enough privacy to stage a revolution, and enough freedom of speech to broadcast widely without the government's consent.
I don't understand that statement. Do you mean we need a widely defined right to privacy, aggressively enforced, because observation is so easy?
I view it the other way. Observation by anyone/everyone is so easy and natural. We should not expect more privacy from law enforcement than we would from any other stranger.
More specific to the posted article, it makes sense that a corporation should be able to sell secure encryption and possibly win in the marketplace because users appreciate their privacy. If users turn out to appreciate convenience instead, then they should expect the FBI to have the same capability that the vendor has to look at users' data.
We should most certainly expect a greater measure of accountability, care to rights, and due process from law enforcement than from random encounters with strangers.
Random people see where you are, their cell phones make incidental record of you in their photographs and videos, but these aren't really actionable for said random person. ISPs and cellular providers have all sorts of info on you, but in theory this isn't being used for continual judgment of suspicion against you (though it wouldn't surprise me if it was). Aggregated together and accessible to law enforcement, though, becomes a greater threat to individuals due to false positives, corrupt police organizations, bad laws, suspicion via incidental association automatically eroding rights, and so on.
Add to this the basic human nature in that our unthinking day to day actions and thoughts are messy, flippant, and not done with care to judgment. We need privacy to be socially healthy.
I think what happened in response to the Boston marathon bombings is a reasonable model: Private cell phone footage and CCTV captures were held individually, and voluntarily offered up to law enforcement for analysis for a particular, egregious crime. In the hands of unaffiliated private parties, that information is innocuous. Aggregated, it is too powerful to not be bound by a far stricter due process. Law enforcement only had access to this because the situation warranted it, not because they had carte blanche access to everything unchecked.
It is unreasonable to expect a typical stranger to have access to aggregated surveillance data. Therefore, law enforcement should need a warrant to access such data.
BTW, in the article, Comey is talking about what access is possible with a warrant.
And the tradeoff that Comey doesn't like and that is out of his hands is that we the people want no mechanism for any digitally remote third party to gain access to our data. In the cell phone case, we don't even want physical access to our devices to provide access to our data by others. Law enforcement's access is collateral damage in this fight, which makes warrants moot anyway. But it's either accessible or not, blind to who is doing the accessing, so closed it should be.
By your analogy... because "anyone" could do this, law enforcement should be able to as well?
Now s/house/computer/
I'm confused as to how you could misconstrue that.
> Observation by anyone/everyone is so easy and natural. We should not expect more privacy from law enforcement than we would from any other stranger.
I disagree. I expect law enforcement to pass a more stringent bar -- ie. get a warrant. The same is true for privacy and data collection (IMO). Just because "anyone" can see and record my activities does not mean law enforcement should be permitted to without a warrant that very narrowly defines the duration and start time. (Ie. No mass surveillance.)
I don't understand THAT statement. I'm pretty sure that the degree of privacy I expect from strangers is far greater than the one currently expected from the FBI or from any law enforcement agencies. I don't expect strangers to tail me or to run profile checks on me, much less call to try to get into my phone to check whether or not I'm really up to something funny.
But you do expect that a stranger could tail you if they wanted to. You could sue that stranger for harassment and get a restraining order, just as you could sue law enforcement for the same thing.
> privacy I expect from strangers is far greater than the one currently expected from the FBI
The comment about strangers not tailing you suggests you care about de facto privacy, rather than de jure privacy (your right to privacy). In that case, if no one is investigating you, you have absolute privacy.
If we're talking about your right to privacy, then I agree that the FBI should have only the same privilege that any citizen has, unless they obtain a warrant. Conversely, I argue that the FBI should be able to get a warrant to access any data that a citizen is legally able to share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_identification
http://www.nature.com/news/brain-decoding-reading-minds-1.13...
I would argue this is the reason a bias toward privacy must exist, modeled after the same international conventions that outlaw use of WMD and torture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
Was an upstanding american!!!!