{"id":5749,"date":"2011-07-10T08:13:21","date_gmt":"2011-07-06T17:14:32","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T17:14:32","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=5749","title":{"rendered":"Cato: \u201cI Guess the \u2018You Are All Criminals Act\u2019 Didn\u2019t Have the Same Ring\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the Cato Institute’s website: I Guess the \u2018You Are All Criminals Act\u2019 Didn\u2019t Have the Same Ring<\/a>, by Julian Sanchez:<\/p>\n

If you thought it was the height of cynicism when legislators dubbed a massive expansion of government surveillance power the \u201cUSA Patriot Act\u201d (recently extended\u2014really!\u2014under the heading of small business legislation), feast your eyes upon the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, on which the House Judiciary Committee is slated to hold a hearing next Tuesday. What kind of monster would dare be on the record opposing that bill?<\/p>\n

As you may have already guessed, the handful of provisions in the bill that really deal specifically with child porn are a fig leaf for its true purpose: A sweeping data retention requirement meant to turn Internet Service Providers and online companies into surrogate snoops for the government\u2019s convenience. Any provider of an \u201celectronic communication\u201d or \u201cremote computing\u201d service\u2014meaning broadband providers like Comcast, but also companies like Google\u2014would have to retain records of the \u201ctemporarily assigned network address\u201d (such as an IP address) associated with each account for 18 months. Some of the other provisions in the act seem perfectly reasonable (though I don\u2019t know enough to say whether they\u2019re necessary), but as a hearing earlier this year made crystal clear, it\u2019s the data retention requirement that the government really cares about.<\/p>\n

Thanks to an unwise Supreme Court decision dating from the 70s, information about your private activites loses its Fourth Amendment protection when it’s held by a \u201cthird party\u201d corporation, like a phone company or Internet provider. As many legal scholars have noted, however, this allows constitutional privacy safeguards to be circumvented via a clever two-step process. Step one: The government forces private businesses (ideally the kind a citizen in the modern world can\u2019t easily avoid dealing with) to collect and store certain kinds of information about everyone\u2014anyone might<\/em> turn out to be a criminal, after all. No Fourth Amendment issue there, because it\u2019s not the government gathering it! Step two: The government gets a subpoena or court order to obtain that information, quite possibly without your knowledge. No Fourth Amendment problem here either, according to the Supreme Court, because now they\u2019re just getting a corporation\u2019s business records, not your private records. It makes no difference that they\u2019re only keeping those records because the government said they had to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}