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Comment by rz2k | Hacker News Reader

Should the police be able to enter any house with locks they can pick? I suppose that would educate people, too.

edit: I misread the comment as, "without a warrant"! Ugh

They already can, with a warrant. The lock need not be picked, they'll just bust down the door.

But when you bust the door the owner knows you did that. It's more insidious when they get in covertly to install microphones, search the house and plant substances.

I don't understand your rebuttal.

Are you disputing that LE does not have the ability to request a wire tap from a judge with a warrant?

Wouldn't you want the police be able to intervene when they hear or observe shouting or fighting through an open door or window?

Are you suggesting that a network-attached microphone is not equivalent to an open window? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine)

>Wouldn't you want the police be able to intervene when they hear or observe shouting or fighting through an open door or window?

Different things. In a closed room, there is expectation of privacy. It is not the same for what can be seen from an open window. Also, there is no assurance that LE won't misuse this to crush any dissent or silence somebody they don't like. It is easy to take something said at home out of context or doctor it to sound like something else.

I think the media have made it clear to the public that there's no expectation of privacy around these devices, and that there would be a hard case to make in court that someone was so insulated from the media that they wouldn't have any knowledge of what those products could be enabled to do with full, legal collaboration between law enforcement and the manufacturer.

This argument will not stand in the courts. Data collection without consent is illegal, which is why there is so much controversy around the stingray things. Getting a warrant to look at the data may be legal, but collecting the said data without consent is illegal in the first place.

I, for one, do not want the police coming to "shouting". Talk about a nanny state.

Agreed.

I meant to convey the idea of imminent and threatening speech.

It's certainly not equivalent. "Third-party doctrine" is extremely bad law that ignores the notion of private relationship. The law even recognizes some notions of private conversations (with your lawyer, and with your doctor), but ignores others (with your cloud provider) because the law is older than the cloud and the government loves making power grabs.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor is right to challenge it. I fear that she is one of a narrow generation that is young enough to understand digital technology, and old enough to remember the right to privacy in personal effects.

Third-party doctrine is not actual law, and challenges only exist as 4th Amendment cases on specific uses (i.e. not the doctrine as a whole). While Sotomayor is right to raise the issue, sadly her words don't constitute action on the topic.

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