Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy | Hacker News Reader

Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy

faz.net

35 pointsmgunes9 comments

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...

It's Sun Tzu 101: information is power. Massive, pre-emptive data warehousing is a weapon of unprecedented scale, which tilts the balance of power between <s>government</s> institutions and citizens.

The most striking thing about this article is probably the main image. It almost perfectly captures implicitly all of the outrage of the tech community over the NSA dragnet. All the hypocrisy in one neat picture.

I was also struck by that image, but the rest of the article is very good too.

IANAL but I know plenty:

US jurisprudence has a primary flaw when comes to privacy: individuals have no rights to most of their own data. Once it is "out there," it's available to be bought and sold without much limitation. A friend is working on a paper in this area to find a way out of this quagmire, but I think it will take a great outrage (ie a heinous crime) to make any progress.

US jurisprudence has a primary flaw when comes to privacy: individuals have no rights to most of their own data. Once it is "out there," it's available to be bought and sold without much limitation.

Yes, it would be much more convenient if I could forbid people I don't like (or who don't like me) from ever talking about me. Unauthorized gossip should be illegal even if it doesn't qualify as slander or libel. The law should assist me in maintaining a wall between my public image and my not-deliberately-publicized (but still done somewhat in public) actions.

You rightly point out that the idea advocated by ballard, as stated, doesn't distinguish the probably narrower category that he's concerned about. But I think what he meant was probably business data - which is distinguishable from newsworthy information. Yes, there are problems associated with this distinction, but I think it could be formulated well enough to protect both press freedom and privacy in commercial transactions.

That said, I think ballard misidentified the problem in another way. The problem is not that "individuals have no rights to most of their own data" in US law - instead the problem is that individuals can be forced to bargain away all their rights to the info in question as a condition of engaging in any ordinary transaction of everyday life.

There's a horrid and eroding legal concept called a "reasonable expectation of privacy."

Unfortunately, it is not referred to in the positive in most cases. On the contrary, it is invoked in the negative based on some legal precedent that eliminates that "reasonable expectation."

I've long wondered if there isn't a potential legal hack hiding there: Providers that advertise an expectation of privacy, webmail with a "This is a private message" checkbox, those (generally pointless) email footers that clarify that the message is intended for its recipient only, etc. (IANAL...)

Obviously, in the current court system it wouldn't do much good on its own, but it could form the backbone of a single precedent-setting case.

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