Good job taking my post out of context. That post was in a sub thread about a broad general right to privacy. Not just narrow protections of electronic communications, but all sorts of tracking that doesn't qualify as a search or seizure. No such right exists. The Constitution doesn't even say the word privacy, nor did the framers write about it in the federalist papers or contemporaneous writings.
My post was about what it would take for the Supreme Court to conjure such a broad right to privacy out of thin air. What it would take is a broad social consensus that such a right should exist. My point was that the tech community is undermining the establishment of that consensus by conditioning people to see online communications as a commercial transaction that can be data mined for advertising and tracking.
Your post makes it seem like my post is about Internet communications. But that sub thread was about a general right to privacy, which is a broader concept. You can shoehorn some elements of Internet privacy into the existing 4th amendment framework. Straightforward analogies to wire taps will get you a long way. But there is a lot of surveillance that doesn't fit the mold of existing 4th amendment protections, particularly those based on tracking using third party or even public information. My post was about what it would take for the Supreme Court to find a general right of privacy that could encompass things that aren't obviously searches or seizures.
Obviously finding a broad right of privacy would take an act of legislating from the bench much larger than simply extending existing wire tap protections to Skype calls. Your post implies that I think a broad social consensus is necessary for the latter.
>Your post makes it seem like my post is about Internet communications.
So? It was, in part. If you're going to say someone is "misrepresenting" you simply on the basis that you talked about more than that one thing, then no one has every been correctly represented in the history of humanity.
Please stop crying wolf, and apologize for your baseless accusation.
Right. Our current guarantees of privacy are already well beyond what the Constitution explicitly sets out (which, strictly read, only covers persons and things).
I think what rayiner is saying is that in order for SCOTUS to declare these internet communications protected, it either needs some extraordinary rationale, or more simply/easily the bulk of the populace needs to believe these communications are protected.
If the typical person believes these communications are private, then this falls under the reasonable expectation of privacy legal test already accepted by SCOTUS.
No, i think what he is pointing at is that privacy is more than just "dont wire tap my calls", "dont read my private message". He says that privacy is much broader than that. I dont want websites tracking what i do. I dont want google saving my search history. Even though i (and many others) put some stuff public (or viewable to friends of friends etc), I dont want anyone using all my public information to stalk me and main a profile of me etc. The list can go on and on. His point is that the law shouldn't extend to things explicitly labelled as "private" or "password-protected". It extends to the use of my public info. And thus we need more work here to come to a consensus what is acceptable and what is not.
It's quite clear if you study historical jurisprudence and relevant case law that the authors of the constitution did not actually intend to create a limited government that respects freedom and human rights, but an elaborate linguistic puzzle for future lawyers and politicians to find loopholes in.
> The Committee then approved, by a recorded vote of 148 in favour to 4 against ( Canada, Israel, United Kingdom, United States), with 27 abstentions, a draft resolution titled “The right to development”.
The privacy one didn't have a vote.
> The draft, approved without a vote, would have the General Assembly call upon Member States to review their procedures, practices and legislation on the surveillance of communications, their interception and collection of personal data, including mass surveillance, with a view to upholding the right to privacy by ensuring the full and effective implementation of all relevant obligations under international human rights law.
"The representative of the United States said her country had long championed the right to privacy and to freedom of expression as pillars of democracy and reaffirmed the relevant human rights instruments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Privacy and freedom of expression should be promoted online and offline, she said, adding that seeking, receiving and imparting information were linked to the right to privacy. Human rights activists used online tools to promote human rights and should therefore be able to use them freely."
Note also the: "Human rights activists used online tools to promote human rights and should therefore be able to use them freely"
The U.S. delegation did get the right to privacy text watered down (and argued that there is no internationally recognized human right to privacy!), but the text still expresses serious concerns over mass surveillance.
The 148-4 vote is not on the right to privacy, but on a different text about the "right to development". The U.S. delegation actually voted in favor of the right-to-privacy text.
If you search this transcript for "The Committee then", you can see that they had many different work items considered at this meeting, not just the privacy item.
The UN really has as much power as we give it, in situations like this. It comes down to your contempt or otherwise for global consensus opinion.
But, if we're justifying the UN, as seems to be necessary by this thread, the UNHCR and the WHO make huge differences, these are the organizations which have been coordinating help for refugees in Syria, and efforts to completely eradicate Polio, for instance. The Security Council is the major means for forcing Russia, China and the West to come to a shared position on Syria, which has led to the decommissioning of chemical weapons. It's also instrumental to avoiding war in Iran - the non-proliferation treaty provides a framework for negotiations, and the IAEA does the actual inspections - and failure to reach consensus in the Council was a major reason why the war in Iraq went so badly.
It's a bit tiring hearing the old John Bolton-esque bullshit about the UN; it's a vital international institution, even if just for diplomacy and discussion.
It's not that the UN as a whole is a bad thing. Its the perfect place for countries to sit and talk. And they do tons for the world. But the view that it is some sort of superior body that governs all the countries is rather... naive. Even the security council for that matter, has had a terrible record track. And i need not remind the absurdity of the veto rule...
No one has power over the US, because the US doesn't recognize any external authority. As Snowden said - it is all a matter of policy.
It is schoolyard justice on an international scale, same as it has always been. To parahprase my history teacher, international relations are surprisingly childish.
Most of the problems arise from the existence of asymmetric information. Consider how a blackmailer's power evaporates when the information they possess is made public. I think the simplest and most likely outcome is that all of the collected data will be made public.
While it would be nice to maintain the illusion of privacy, it is only that, an illusion.
Consider how a blackmailer's power evaporates when the information they possess is made public.
The blackmailer's power to exploit the victim evaporates, but the victim's situation may still deteriorate. For example, you discover that I am a former stripper, but nowadays I teach elementary school. You contact me and threaten me with exposure. I turn the matter over to the police. Through police carelessness or some other unrelated cause,t he information becomes public anyway. Your abaility to exort money in return for silence is gone, but I get kicked out of my teaching job anyway and can't find another one, so I lose several years of my economic life, and possibly social standing etc.
A common problem with blackmail/privacy hypotheticals is an ambiguity over the moral culpability of the secret information. I personally don't think being a former stripper is a moral impediment to teaching elementary school but )a many disagree and b) I can think of many other things that I would consider a moral impediment but not one that I could necessarily justify on objective grounds.
Right. I needed to define "problems." Problems at the level of society. If everyone has access to everyone else's behavior on the internet, society would change, yes, but I do not really believe the possibility of 'change' to be a problem itself.
Considering your former stripper example:
- If they would be kicked out of the job, is the former stripper not defrauding the school and the parent in this example? Privacy in this case is helping the former stripper deceive the (possibly overprotective) parent. Is reducing the incidence of fraud a problem?
- people having false beliefs and biases that are shattered by new information (possibly harmful by causing them emotional distress?) is not a reason to prevent the discovery of that new information. Generally, I don't think it is a problem if the reality of the world causes trauma in the form of preventing foolish ideas from continuing. I imagine Ted Haggard's outing was very emotionally traumatic for his parishioners.
- Relative social morals would obviously change. Almost everyone has done something society deems weird on the internet. Social norms around pornography, for example, will change. The moment this happens, the parent would likely realize, everyone has done something possibly deemed objectionable in their past. Further, the parent would have better information about how the former stripper is currently behaving - the best way for them to make decisions about their child now.
I picked that example because it's not actually illegal to be a stripped in many jurisdictions; while it's a stereotypically sleazy job, the sleaze factor arguably attaches to what strippers have to put up with as much as their activities. Thus, I'm not sure if or why parents should have an expectation of awareness about such activity in a person's past.
To be honest, I think you're overly optimistic about people's willingness to go with the flow of social permissiveness. Quite a lot of people are reactionaries.
How do these problems arise from asymmetric information?
Blackmailers have information, which becomes valueless when it is made public; their activities have much in common with selling non-public information for the purpose of insider-trading. I do not see what this has to do with privacy.
Let's define privacy first. Does privacy mean my communications are monitored by the NSA? Or does privacy mean Facebook has to display some message to people who voluntarily make their private information public?
It is unfortunate that there is no UN definition of 'terrorism', since those fighting this privacy resolution would be the biggest 'terrorist states' in the world. Best to remove the meaningless 'countering terrorism' term altogether and build a world based on trust, freedom and cooperation.
I am very skeptical to anything coming from UN, they as an organization are completely deprecated.
As for this shameful bunch that voted against this, it is just state of where they are and all of us in terms of freedom and civilized conduct.
There is no international agreement which requires costly action, and is adhered to; most simply require signatories to do what they would have done anyway. International agreements simply are a method of signaling at very low cost.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6803409