Yes they do, mainly because it’s the law.
That it’s a misguided law is open for debate, but I don’t believe there is any state in the world that doesn’t monitor and control tele-communications (internet is regulated as tele-communications WW).
That it’s a misguided law is open for debate, but I don’t believe there is any state in the world that doesn’t monitor and control tele-communications (internet is regulated as tele-communications WW).
> ... access to this data is so accessible remotely that physically visiting an internet provider’s premises is no longer required for government agencies.
They were expecting government agents to have to physically visit the ISP's offices? Were they perhaps going to get their data on a floppy disk?
One of examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Airgapped systems are also still a thing.
On-site access would also make it harder to abuse the data at scale.
I’m not surprised that the data is accessed remotely. But I can also understand scenarios where it makes sense to require physical access, and not because of long gone floppy disk drives or other ancient hardware.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/foriegn-intelligence-s...
Such rights were included even in the constitutions of many communist countries, despite the fact that there it was a routine activity for the secret police to open all suspect private correspondence and listen to many telephone calls. Nonetheless, they had to be careful to not get caught, because the official version was that their activities were illegal and even anti-constitutional.
Unfortunately, now almost everywhere such rights have been weakened or completely eliminated, without any good justification and without the opposition that such changes deserved.
What do you mean "without any good justification" ? It is for your own good to protect you from terrorists (the bad ones specifically), hate speech (anything which is against the official narative) and child porn. /s
Why would change deserve opposition when it is for your own good and the change is in better [1] ? /s
[1] See Monty Python's Life of Brian - Ex-lepper scene.
The FCC doesn't regulate content on cable TV. Technologically, there's no reason cable radio couldn't have existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commiss...
Even if the FCC chose not to regulate broadcast programming, they or some other body, would still need to enforce rights to frequencies. That's their raison d'etre. Content policing is an added function, which the law has found valid in the past precisely because frequencies are limited. I can't see such public interest legal opinions being newly formed today.
"Rights of investigation" and "capillary monitoring" are poles.