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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, why is it not a law that the government can't pay another entity to do something it's not allowed to do itself, without a warrant? I'm thinking about geo data from mobile apps.

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Because the US has been corrupted for quite a long time now, we just liked to bury ours heads in the sand and pretend otherwise until now because it hadn't bitten us in the ass too hard. There is no such thing as the spirit of the law, it has no useful meaning in US law. Loop holes and oversight in legislation and rulings is not seen as a bad thing, it is seen as desirable because it lets us be corrupt legally, and in many cases earns courts and cops and lawyers a hefty profit off the backs of the citizenry.

It’s due to the third party doctrine, a Supreme Court precedent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

which has been warped all out of any comprehensible reality. It hinges on the idea of 'voluntarily' turning over information. Much of what is now considered information voluntarily turned over isn't even information that people know exist much less that they are turning over much less doing so voluntarily.

It's not voluntary if you don't know about it.

Requiring someone pay for information by any common sense interpretation isn't voluntary.

The courts have lost their goddamn minds.

The 3rd party doctrine is why it is allowed when no law restricts it. It does not prevent Congress to pass a law.

And yet, Congress hasn't passed a law to prevent it

Give up social media, make the man do it the old fashion way.

If the government is being too obvious about the fact that the entity in question is nothing more than its puppet, then something can be done about that. Entities that are government entities in everything but name can be considered to be government entities and become subject to all the relevant restrictions. There's some fancy-ass phrase for this, but I can't remember it at the moment.

Also, the third-party doctrine hasn't been good enough for certainly the last thirty and maybe the last hundred years. But, authoritarians aren't easily separated from their tools of oppression, so I expect to not see that cluster of regulations updated to be actually protective within my lifetime.

> why is it not a law that the government can't pay another entity to do something it's not allowed to do itself, without a warrant?

I think the median American favors security over freedom right now. The reality of cable news and now social media is that an unsolved crime is a national anxiety. When we’re whipped into a collective panic like that, it seems outright ridiculous that the cops not be allowed to access anything that could help.

"why is there not a law...?"

If you're just venting with friends, or trying to build cred as a moral philosopher, then yes, obviously there should be such a law.

Vs. if you're talking about cause and effect, in the real world... its kinda like how foxes never pass laws against foxes moonlighting as henhouse guards. Or somehow Officer Fox, Prosecutor Fox, and Judge Fox don't seem keen on enforcing that law.

Why even should they be allowed to contract an action that they themselves cannot perform - even _with_ a warrant? Is that not still "doing" the action?

Because the government makes the law?

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