{"id":6277,"date":"2011-11-14T19:26:49","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T00:02:49","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T19:09:26","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=6277","title":{"rendered":"Cato: “Internet Belatedly Notices How Much Spying Government Can Do Without a Warrant”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cato: Internet Belatedly Notices How Much Spying Government Can Do Without a Warrant<\/a> by Julian Sanchez:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m seeing a lot of technology news sites reporting<\/a>, in tones of shock and horror, on a recent court ruling holding that people generally waive their Fourth Amendment \u201cexpectation of privacy\u201d in data collected on them by Internet sites, at least when the sites give some kind of notice (however buried in legalese) that they do collect that data. That means, in this instance, that the government can obtain detailed connection records from Twitter about users associated with Wikileaks without a full-blown Fourth Amendment warrant based on probable cause<\/a>: A subpoena or a court order based on a far weaker claim of \u201crelevance\u201d to an investigation will suffice.<\/p>\n

But this isn\u2019t some shocking new precedent. It\u2019s been the status quo since 1986<\/a>, when our increasingly outdated electronic privacy laws were written, and arguably for longer than that.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of problems with this most recent decision, to be sure. For one, as security researcher Chris Soghoian notes<\/a>, the court based its opinion on the current Twitter privacy policy, even though the policy in effect at the time the targets of the investigation signed up for the site was significantly more protective. In a way, though, this seems unnecessary: Under the misguided Supreme Court decisions that established our modern \u201cthird party doctrine,\u201d contractual promises of privacy don\u2019t matter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In other words, users are held to \u201cassume the risk\u201d that any third party might turn their information over to the government, effectively waiving their Fourth Amendment rights over that data, even if the third party explicitly promises not to do this. The one reason the privacy policy might be relevant here is that the \u201cthird party doctrine\u201d covers information knowingly conveyed to third parties, and while it\u2019s obvious that you \u201cconvey\u201d a dialed phone number to the phone company when you make a call (for instance), it might not be as obvious that Web sites you visit are logging your Internet Protocol address. (other hyperlinks in original; but second added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” said Thomas Jefferson in 1809 [and a bunch of others]<\/a>, who pays attention while you were sleeping<\/a>? I do, for one.<\/p>\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-6277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6277","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=6277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}