Amerika, I disappointedFollow

The point of a warrant isn't to make you feel better. It's an assurance that a neutral third party with a passing acquaintance with the Constitution has agreed that there is reasonable cause to paw through your stuff, whether physical or digital.

Yes. If the concern is the state of my computer and data flowing through it due to a third party hack? Yes.

You mean like "don't significantly alter you computer at this time as it would mess up the investigation"? Yes.

Are these supposed to be trick questions or something?

A camera on every ***** and a hand on every table! The future looks bright! There is one born every minute!

Not at all. Only to show that your concern appears to be that you are being monitored and not whether or not "it's legal". If you're not going to alter your actions, then why do you care if you're being monitored if there is a legitimate reason and it can be done without your knowing? On the other side, as you pointed out, if you were going to alter your actions (which you would inherently do no matter how much you tried not to), then you would tip off the hackers. So, what is the benefit of telling you?


Again, you're treating all correspondences the same. Who are "they"? A script can easily search for key words without any one person seeing anything or any information being maintained. This is no different than your mail being scanned without someone physically seeing, knowing or going through all of your mail. To pretend that you have this level of privacy where you can send stuff to other people without it having some form of check is ridiculous. Digital email is not the same as a physical letter. Your rights aren't abrogated, you just have a misunderstanding of your rights. Just like how people yell "freedom of speech" for everything. You have the right to live in your house with no one coming inside to do searches out of concern. However, if you place a large ISIS flag in your front porch, you have given reason of concern. Is that enough to do a house search? I don't know, but to act like there is a better way to monitor these cyber threats and terrorist plotting is ridiculous, especially when you fail to provide an alternative.

Why would you substantially alter your HDD? You and your virus scans obviously are clueless of what is going on, or you wouldn't have been hacked long enough to be executing attacks on the nation. Since you are not the only victim, it would be better not to tell you as you would most naturally feel to behave differently.

I do love me some beef and broccoli.

If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything they say.

I think the biggest issue is that most people don't actually understand the issue of privacy and where it starts/ends. A whole lot of the "OMG! Government is spying on us!" narrative plays on this fact. As a general rule, privacy rights are derived from property rights. The government cannot look at anything that infringes on your own property (or passes some kind of "reasonable expectation of privacy" test). So what you do in your own living room is private. If the government wants to snoop, they need a warrant. Of course, if you have your blinds open and are doing <whatever> in plain sight, they can sit outside your house and watch as much as they want, just like anyone else on the street (although recording what you're doing gets into some interesting legal areas, and will usually require a warrant to be admissible in court anyway). Where the "reasonable expectation" comes in, would be say using some kind of infrared or other technology to see through walls or shaded windows, for example. As a general rule, sight and sound that can be seen or heard outside your property without any technological assistance is "public". Anything else is private.

Note, this "property" concept extends to temporarily rented/leased/whatever property as well. You can't be spied on in a hotel room without a warrant, for example. The fact that you rented the room, however, isn't protected. Post is also a special case. The contents of any packages you send are private property, but again the fact that you sent it (and where from/to) is not.

With regard to electronic communications, it's a bit trickier, but still follows the same general rule. The contents of email are private, but the fact that you sent an email (and from/to) is not. Posting something onto a site owned by someone else, and/or to a location that is publicly accessible means that it's not private. So your facebook page? Anything not secured by you isn't private. And of course, any content that someone you've allowed to view and is then shared to a public location? Also not protected (so unless you really trust your friends, not really private). Twitter? Not private at all. Any random person can read any tweets you've ever made. By definition, it's the equivalent of you speaking in a public place for anyone passing by to hear.

Electronic media also creates an additional privacy issue in that the contents are generally "permanent". There's a copy of every single thing you post, copy, upload, tweet, email, etc on a server somewhere. So unlike private conversations that can only be listened to if someone has a warrant and is listening at the time you speak, electronic communications can be listened into at any point in the future. So if you *ever* do something that might justify a warrant, anything and everything you've ever spoken electronically may be subject to surveillance after the fact. Even private papers in your desk can be destroyed if you know the cops are coming, for example. Not so much electronic stuff (well, unless you own the server yourself, like a certain former secretary of state and current presidential hopeful did).

I honestly do suspect that a lot of the surveillance going on by our government, while maybe a bit creepy, is not illegal in any way at all. Most people practice security through obscurity, and willingly put information out there on the thinking that "what's the odds that anyone I don't want to know this is actually reading this right now?". And that usually works, until you start talking about government organizations like the NSA, which can actually slurp up every single publicly accessible bit of electronic data on the internet in real time, put it on their servers, and then run pattern recognition scans on it to find whatever things they're looking for and to make recommendations with regard to more intrusive surveillance (which may require FISA approval, for example) Again, potentially creepy, but not illegal at all.

It's like dashing across the living room naked thinking "what's the odds someone's looking at my window right now?". Probably not a big deal, right? Well, in the electronic world, someone is always looking. I just think more people need to be aware of this fact, accept it, and modify their online behavior accordingly. The NSA doesn't need to tap our computers. We put more than enough data out there willingly already.

Edited, May 4th 2015 2:32pm by gbaji

What do you mean by "outside of my email"? The subject line is technically "inside" the email header information, and presumably just as protected as the contents of the email itself. If you're talking about the header stuff some portions of it are used for routing, and therefore would be exposed to any hop along the way (ie: not private at all). It's as private as the stuff you write on the outside of an envelope (ie: not private).

Um... Obviously, having said all of this, there's also an issue of clear text across the wan. That's still in a kind of legal grey area because from an electronic point of view, it's more or less like writing a message to a friend across the square by utilizing a scrolling ticker with the text of your message on it that travels along the buildings between you. Anyone who looks at it can see it. Modern email servers use proprietary encoding (not necessarily encryption though), to send messages. That *should* fall into the "reasonable expectation of privacy" category. But, for example, posting text to a forum like this one, in the absence of any security models in place, even if the forum page itself required some kind of password to access, might still be visible to anyone who's watching the hops along the way. Probably not usable in a court situation, but also not necessarily illegal to collect.

Happened to a kid at Pflugerville High School.

You could probably present a convincing argument that it was a mercy killing.