I think a big difference between the government following you with a car or hiding in the bushes, versus the collection of data/metadata, has to do with ease of collection. I know that, right now, the government could be sitting outside my building, waiting for me to come out, and then they could drive behind me on my way home. But I doubt they're going to bother, partly because I don't think I've done anything worth spying on, and partly because it takes a lot of effort and manpower for them to spy on me. It would take at least one, maybe two people to keep constant surveillance on me. That is a huge expenditure of effort. Even though it's technically legal for the cops to follow me everywhere, or follow everyone everywhere, that's not going to happen because it's not physically possible for them to track everyone just to see if someone does something sketchy.
Electronic data collection, though? If we take this data collection and analysis to its logical conclusion, it comes down to clicking a button. Click, and now you have a sea of data on me and any number of other people. There may be technical limitations that prevent the government from literally spying on everyone, but they can at least spy on huge numbers of people with virtually no expenditure of resources. The fact that it's so easy is, itself, a problem. Because the justification for doing so shifts from "We are suspicious enough of this person to dedicate a large number of man-hours to tracking him" to "Eh, why not?"
Is that a theoretical/philosophical reason for it to be impermissible though?
Can something be a violation of Freedom of Expression solely because the government gets better at it or has more resources? Or Due process? Is it possible for something to be a perfectly acceptable violation of equal protection until it becomes common?
If storing the metadata of everyone's phone calls is a violation of privacy, storing one person's should be if we're talking about rights. If it only becomes objectionable because of the breadth of the program, then you're arguing about the implementation of the policy rather than the policy itself. If its OK to gather one person's metadata by a certain standard, it should be permissible to do so for everyone's. If N0 is not a violation, and Ni+1 doesn't provide a reason its a violation, then...
If storing the metadata of everyone when its easy is a violation of privacy, storing it when its difficult should be as well. But there's a long tradition and precedence of following someone to see who they talk to as being permissible without a warrant. I can't really see a situation where once you're good enough at tailing them, it becomes a violation of their privacy. Its not about giving someone a fair shot, its about expectation. If a single person doesn't have an expectation of privacy in regard to the people they communicate with through a third party, no one does.
In the programs we know about, a warrant was used to obtain the metadata. But I think the only way to make the whole thing impermissible is to show that the metadata is fundamentally different in some way to following you and seeing who you speak to in person. And I don't yet have a strong enough formulation for that.
@Schrodinger I sincerely suggest that you dedicate a significant amount of time to understanding the State Actor doctrine, a foundational piece of the American legal system, before you decide whether to continue with besides-the-point comparisons between private actors and government actors.
I find the state actor argument to be a very dangerous one with regard to actual freedom.
It's not an argument; it's an uncontroversial and longstanding rule that governs whether many American rights apply to a particular situation.
Yes it is an argument. Specifically a legal argument. But, of course, since we know that what is legal =/= what is right (we even had a thread on this) an argument that simply stops at what is legal is an incredibly poor one.
AngelHedgie's whole, very good, point is that the whole "State Actor doctrine" is itself dangerously short-sighted.
It seems especially naive in today's world where the power and influence of non-state actors is so incredibly high and incredibly well known.
No.
It is nonsensical to point at black-letter law and call it a legal argument; it would be a very similar error to call the First Amendment a legal argument.
Dude, you are referencing a law. It is a legal argument.
You are arguing about what is legal or what could be legal, not what should be.
The State-Actor Doctrine is a purely legal american framing, and it's a rather stupid one.
mr. pants, the ease of use is exactly what makes this usage abusive.
a knife is a terribly ineffective weapon of mass destruction. would you argue that nukes should be sold at walmart because all they do is make it faster and easier to kill a million people than an unregulated knife?
when it is effortless to violate the peoples liberty, steps must be taken to keep away the temptation.
Go in, get the girl, kill the dragon. What's so hard about that? ... Oh, so THAT'S what a dragon looks like.
mr. pants, the ease of use is exactly what makes this usage abusive.
a knife is a terribly ineffective weapon of mass destruction. would you argue that nukes should be sold at walmart because all they do is make it faster and easier to kill a million people than an unregulated knife?
when it is effortless to violate the peoples liberty, steps must be taken to keep away the temptation.
You completely missed the point. Like to the point where you didn't just fail to catch the ball, you're playing an entirely different sport.
To try and wedge some semblance of a connection into your ham-fisted metaphor, Pants is saying that killing one person with a knife should not be considered trivial just because it was harder to do than using some other weapon.
Dude, you are referencing a law. It is a legal argument.
You are arguing about what is legal or what could be legal, not what should be.
The State-Actor Doctrine is a purely legal american framing, and it's a rather stupid one.
I disagree. Its a necessary one in a system that acknowledges fundamental liberties and limitations on governmental power.
Actions taken by the government are fundamentally different than private actions, even by the wealthy and influential. The reasons for limiting in the former may be pragmatic, or may be philosophical. Society may or may not run more smoothly with racial discrimination by the government, but the philosophically that is not permissible. In order to further the goals of society, similar restrictions on private action may be enacted (Fair Housing Act for instance), but those are policy decisions built on a pragmatic intent to produce a more just society.
They are related but not identical. The former is an inherent restriction placed on the government that says while you are attempting to further your goals, you are not permitted to utilize the following methods. The latter is a method being used to further a goal informed by the same philosophical paradigm.
A person has the right to sue the government and say it violated its own fundamental laws. One doesn't have the right to sue and say the laws aren't optimal.
If freedom of speech or anti-discrimination is all policy, none of it can be challenged fundamentally, and all of it is up for debate the next time the goals, or those who decide what the goals are, change.
from what I read, he was using a reverse slippery slope argument. That if we make X illegal, we have to make R illegal too. therefor X shouldn't be illegal.
the having of a knife is not illegal because it is fairly unlikely that owning a knife will make you a murderer, and there are legit uses for knives.
likewise, police detectives, restrained by resources and laws are useful for solving crimes and minimally exploitable.
on the other hand, nukes are good at stopping wars, but make mass murder trivially easy. The UN has strict rules on possessing them for that reason. (though they might want to actually enforce those rules someday)
likewise, a tool that collects data automatically in mass about basically everyone might be useful for some legit things, but the incredible ease with which you can learn everything worth learning about a person makes the potential for mass violations of liberty a major concern.
galdon on
Go in, get the girl, kill the dragon. What's so hard about that? ... Oh, so THAT'S what a dragon looks like.
I think a big difference between the government following you with a car or hiding in the bushes, versus the collection of data/metadata, has to do with ease of collection. I know that, right now, the government could be sitting outside my building, waiting for me to come out, and then they could drive behind me on my way home. But I doubt they're going to bother, partly because I don't think I've done anything worth spying on, and partly because it takes a lot of effort and manpower for them to spy on me. It would take at least one, maybe two people to keep constant surveillance on me. That is a huge expenditure of effort. Even though it's technically legal for the cops to follow me everywhere, or follow everyone everywhere, that's not going to happen because it's not physically possible for them to track everyone just to see if someone does something sketchy.
Electronic data collection, though? If we take this data collection and analysis to its logical conclusion, it comes down to clicking a button. Click, and now you have a sea of data on me and any number of other people. There may be technical limitations that prevent the government from literally spying on everyone, but they can at least spy on huge numbers of people with virtually no expenditure of resources. The fact that it's so easy is, itself, a problem. Because the justification for doing so shifts from "We are suspicious enough of this person to dedicate a large number of man-hours to tracking him" to "Eh, why not?"
Is that a theoretical/philosophical reason for it to be impermissible though?
Can something be a violation of Freedom of Expression solely because the government gets better at it or has more resources? Or Due process? Is it possible for something to be a perfectly acceptable violation of equal protection until it becomes common?
If storing the metadata of everyone's phone calls is a violation of privacy, storing one person's should be if we're talking about rights. If it only becomes objectionable because of the breadth of the program, then you're arguing about the implementation of the policy rather than the policy itself. If its OK to gather one person's metadata by a certain standard, it should be permissible to do so for everyone's. If N0 is not a violation, and Ni+1 doesn't provide a reason its a violation, then...
If storing the metadata of everyone when its easy is a violation of privacy, storing it when its difficult should be as well. But there's a long tradition and precedence of following someone to see who they talk to as being permissible without a warrant. I can't really see a situation where once you're good enough at tailing them, it becomes a violation of their privacy. Its not about giving someone a fair shot, its about expectation. If a single person doesn't have an expectation of privacy in regard to the people they communicate with through a third party, no one does.
In the programs we know about, a warrant was used to obtain the metadata. But I think the only way to make the whole thing impermissible is to show that the metadata is fundamentally different in some way to following you and seeing who you speak to in person. And I don't yet have a strong enough formulation for that.
It may or may not be an argument against the philosophy of the issue, and it may or may not be an argument against the constitutionality of the issue. It is absolutely an argument against the policy as currently implemented.
It's not like we have no precedent for things that are fine when one person does them, but not when everybody does them. One person deciding he can determine on his own when to ignore a crosswalk is not so much a problem; one million people is. One person throwing a paper wrapper on the ground is not a problem; one million people is.
And I think you're drawing a line between policy and implementation of same, when the two issues are not starkly divided. The nature of the data being collected means that how you're collecting it and why you're collecting it are tied together. The government is collecting millions of bits of data because the data is only meaningful when you collect millions of bits of it.
What it comes down to is that some of us are looking at the broad picture and saying, "The way this is going on, the entire picture taken together, is bad." And others are analyzing each tiny bit of the picture and saying, "Well, this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine, therefore if you combine them all it must still be fine." Except no, no, nononono. The wrongness with the situation is sort of an emergent behavior that doesn't exist until the whole picture comes together. It is a situation that is shittier than the sum of its parts.
But here, let's address the privacy issue directly. First off, I will state that I think the government tailing somebody who may or may not be guilty of anything is, itself, an invasion of privacy. Spying on someone in general, without their knowing, is an invasion of privacy. We don't allow it to happen because it's not in any way a bad thing, we allow it to happen because it is, in itself, a very small bad, weighted against the good thing of the government being able to catch criminals and prevent crime. Just like a single instance of our military accidentally shooting an innocent during a war is a bad thing, but is weighed against the greater good of, say, stopping a genocide.
When it is difficult for the government to spy on people, there's not really that much of a problem. A little oversight, and the difficulty of the process prevents in from becoming abused, or becoming an epidemic. The easier it is to spy, though, the more it becomes a problem. Instead of a few little bads being outweighed by a larger good, you have millions of little bads being weighed against a good that - let's be honest - isn't that much bigger than it was in the pre-digital age. If the government is spying on a thousand times more people, are we, as a society, a thousand times safer? I sure as hell don't feel a thousand times safer. I do feel a thousand times more likely to have strangers privy to details of my life that I might not want them to know.
When shooting innocents in a war becomes the rule rather than the exception, it makes you stop and think about what value you're getting out of this war of yours. You don't - or shouldn't - just shrug and say, "Well, one instance of accidental death isn't that big a deal, and we have to wage wars, right?" If all these new deaths are the result of some new tech - drones, say (and I'm not arguing against drones specifically, rather I'm just picking a piece of tech for sake of argument) - then maybe you should examine your use of that tech. And if turns out that it's impossible to use that tech without those huge costs, I think maybe not using the tech for that purpose anymore should be up for consideration.
I suppose this argument hinges upon the definition of spying on someone as an inherently bad thing. If you think spying on people is value-neutral, then you're probably not going to be convinced. But then, this would also mean that stalking someone would be value-neutral. If you think stalkers are doing something wrong, while spying is itself completely neutral, then maybe you should ask yourself why that is. Because that's a pretty big example of cognitive dissonance right there.
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I think a big difference between the government following you with a car or hiding in the bushes, versus the collection of data/metadata, has to do with ease of collection. I know that, right now, the government could be sitting outside my building, waiting for me to come out, and then they could drive behind me on my way home. But I doubt they're going to bother, partly because I don't think I've done anything worth spying on, and partly because it takes a lot of effort and manpower for them to spy on me. It would take at least one, maybe two people to keep constant surveillance on me. That is a huge expenditure of effort. Even though it's technically legal for the cops to follow me everywhere, or follow everyone everywhere, that's not going to happen because it's not physically possible for them to track everyone just to see if someone does something sketchy.
Electronic data collection, though? If we take this data collection and analysis to its logical conclusion, it comes down to clicking a button. Click, and now you have a sea of data on me and any number of other people. There may be technical limitations that prevent the government from literally spying on everyone, but they can at least spy on huge numbers of people with virtually no expenditure of resources. The fact that it's so easy is, itself, a problem. Because the justification for doing so shifts from "We are suspicious enough of this person to dedicate a large number of man-hours to tracking him" to "Eh, why not?"
Is that a theoretical/philosophical reason for it to be impermissible though?
Can something be a violation of Freedom of Expression solely because the government gets better at it or has more resources? Or Due process? Is it possible for something to be a perfectly acceptable violation of equal protection until it becomes common?
If storing the metadata of everyone's phone calls is a violation of privacy, storing one person's should be if we're talking about rights. If it only becomes objectionable because of the breadth of the program, then you're arguing about the implementation of the policy rather than the policy itself. If its OK to gather one person's metadata by a certain standard, it should be permissible to do so for everyone's. If N0 is not a violation, and Ni+1 doesn't provide a reason its a violation, then...
If storing the metadata of everyone when its easy is a violation of privacy, storing it when its difficult should be as well. But there's a long tradition and precedence of following someone to see who they talk to as being permissible without a warrant. I can't really see a situation where once you're good enough at tailing them, it becomes a violation of their privacy. Its not about giving someone a fair shot, its about expectation. If a single person doesn't have an expectation of privacy in regard to the people they communicate with through a third party, no one does.
In the programs we know about, a warrant was used to obtain the metadata. But I think the only way to make the whole thing impermissible is to show that the metadata is fundamentally different in some way to following you and seeing who you speak to in person. And I don't yet have a strong enough formulation for that.
There are times when a difference in quantity manifests a difference in quality, both ethically and legally. Genocide, for example, is a lot of murder, but we treat it as something qualitatively different from a heap of murders.
You are correct that we need to be clear about our grievances, and articulate the exact problem. It could be that the wrongness of collecting data on 100,000 people is nothing more than heaping the wrongness of collecting data on 1 person 100,000 times. Or, it could be that the quantitative shift results in a change in quality, as well. So, collecting data on 100,000 people is not merely a multiplication of what happens when data is collected from one individual.
It seems that, practically, the ease of data collection, in this case, does manifest a difference. The government is not hiring 100,000 private detectives to follow us. There are differences in cost, differences in method, differences of means, differences of difficulty, differences of scope, etc.
If we limit this to only electronic surveillance through data collection, I do not know if the increase in quantity results in a difference in quality. At the moment, I am inclined to say that electronically spying on 100,000 people is significantly qualitatively different from electronically spying on one person. That seems to be the initial impression of most folks.
The trick is to suss out what, exactly, the difference is. Because, as you say, "there's more of it!" is merely a quantitative distinction. We need to articulate the exact change in quality to support Jeffe's point.
I'll also point out again that you can do things with 100,000 bits of data that are more than just what you can do with 1 bit of data 100,000 times. The Finding Paul Revere article on metadata analysis illustrates this nicely.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
What it comes down to is that some of us are looking at the broad picture and saying, "The way this is going on, the entire picture taken together, is bad." And others are analyzing each tiny bit of the picture and saying, "Well, this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine, therefore if you combine them all it must still be fine." Except no, no, nononono. The wrongness with the situation is sort of an emergent behavior that doesn't exist until the whole picture comes together. It is a situation that is shittier than the sum of its parts.
To be fair to Pants, the heaping problem is a difficult problem. He could turn around and ask you to articulate the exact number of data-bits required to move from the "ok" level of data collection to the "oh noes!" level.
If you do maintain that "The wrongness with the situation is sort of an emergent behavior that doesn't exist until the whole picture comes together", you would need to articulate why the "whole picture" manifests wrongness.
Collecting 1 byte of data, that's ok.
Collecting 2 bytes of data, that's ok.
...
Collecting 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, that's not ok.
Something changed between the 1 and the 1,000,000,000,000,000. Pants is able to maintain consistency throughout, since the ok-ness of the 1 continues through to the 1,000,000,000,000,000. If you think something changes in quality, based on the change in quantity, you need to articulate where, exactly, the change occurs.
Good luck with that.
Edit: I guess you could skirt the heaping problem by declaring that data collection is bad "when it is useful for discerning X, Y, or Z", but then the wrongness is found in the use of data, rather than its being collected. If you want the data collection, in itself, to be problematic you need to articulate a means of discerning the problematic possibilities from the unproblematic actualities: "This data could be used to discern X, Y, or Z."
So, the distinction between quality and quantity, the heaping problem, and the distinction between potentiality and actuality. Three very simple philosophical problems all smashed together.
Dude, you are referencing a law. It is a legal argument.
You are arguing about what is legal or what could be legal, not what should be.
The State-Actor Doctrine is a purely legal american framing, and it's a rather stupid one.
I disagree. Its a necessary one in a system that acknowledges fundamental liberties and limitations on governmental power.
It's the opposite. Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
What you propose is a classical liberal view of the issue, which fits with the constitution as originally written (given the time it was written) but is pretty fucking stupid overall.
Actions taken by the government are fundamentally different than private actions, even by the wealthy and influential. The reasons for limiting in the former may be pragmatic, or may be philosophical. Society may or may not run more smoothly with racial discrimination by the government, but the philosophically that is not permissible. In order to further the goals of society, similar restrictions on private action may be enacted (Fair Housing Act for instance), but those are policy decisions built on a pragmatic intent to produce a more just society.
They are related but not identical. The former is an inherent restriction placed on the government that says while you are attempting to further your goals, you are not permitted to utilize the following methods. The latter is a method being used to further a goal informed by the same philosophical paradigm.
This is terrible reasoning. And circular, since you are using this idea of "this is policy" while basing this solely on the conclusion you are trying to show (ie - that government and private actions are fundamentally different and that private actions are only restricted as a matter of policy).
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
A person has the right to sue the government and say it violated its own fundamental laws. One doesn't have the right to sue and say the laws aren't optimal.
If freedom of speech or anti-discrimination is all policy, none of it can be challenged fundamentally, and all of it is up for debate the next time the goals, or those who decide what the goals are, change.
This part doesn't even make any sense. Maybe it's semi-coherent in light of the faulty argument that precedes it, but even then.
Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
In a legal context, what other than government / government powers can affect an individual's rights?
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
What else would a right be?
- What the government cannot do.
- What you can do, because the government cannot prevent it.
I fear you may have a god in your ontology who hands out rights.
Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
In a legal context, what other than government / government powers can affect an individual's rights?
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
What else would a right be?
- What the government cannot do.
- What you can do, because the government cannot prevent it.
I fear you may have a god in your ontology who hands out rights.
There are more contexts than just the legal one, and you ignore them at your peril. If you are looking at the acquisition of personal data strictly from the standpoint of what the government can do with it, that's one thing, but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect, then you better be looking at the other side as well.
After all, the person afraid to speak because of reprisal from their employer is no freer than the person fearing government reprisal.
Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
In a legal context, what other than government / government powers can affect an individual's rights?
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
What else would a right be?
- What the government cannot do.
- What you can do, because the government cannot prevent it.
I fear you may have a god in your ontology who hands out rights.
There are more contexts than just the legal one, and you ignore them at your peril. If you are looking at the acquisition of personal data strictly from the standpoint of what the government can do with it, that's one thing, but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect, then you better be looking at the other side as well.
After all, the person afraid to speak because of reprisal from their employer is no freer than the person fearing government reprisal.
What would you make of the argument that it may be easier to tackle the private industry side of the problem once the state-side of the issue is taken care of? That enshrining protections against the state in law thus allows us to then apply those reasonings to the private sector in situations where the private sector can just as easily abuse the information [this also may be where what's going on with the FCC might be apropos?]
What it comes down to is that some of us are looking at the broad picture and saying, "The way this is going on, the entire picture taken together, is bad." And others are analyzing each tiny bit of the picture and saying, "Well, this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine, therefore if you combine them all it must still be fine." Except no, no, nononono. The wrongness with the situation is sort of an emergent behavior that doesn't exist until the whole picture comes together. It is a situation that is shittier than the sum of its parts.
To be fair to Pants, the heaping problem is a difficult problem. He could turn around and ask you to articulate the exact number of data-bits required to move from the "ok" level of data collection to the "oh noes!" level.
If you do maintain that "The wrongness with the situation is sort of an emergent behavior that doesn't exist until the whole picture comes together", you would need to articulate why the "whole picture" manifests wrongness.
Collecting 1 byte of data, that's ok.
Collecting 2 bytes of data, that's ok.
...
Collecting 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, that's not ok.
Something changed between the 1 and the 1,000,000,000,000,000. Pants is able to maintain consistency throughout, since the ok-ness of the 1 continues through to the 1,000,000,000,000,000. If you think something changes in quality, based on the change in quantity, you need to articulate where, exactly, the change occurs.
Good luck with that.
Edit: I guess you could skirt the heaping problem by declaring that data collection is bad "when it is useful for discerning X, Y, or Z", but then the wrongness is found in the use of data, rather than its being collected. If you want the data collection, in itself, to be problematic you need to articulate a means of discerning the problematic possibilities from the unproblematic actualities: "This data could be used to discern X, Y, or Z."
So, the distinction between quality and quantity, the heaping problem, and the distinction between potentiality and actuality. Three very simple philosophical problems all smashed together.
There are several ways to address this, even adhering to the conditions you set out.
For the heaping problem, let's posit that we can quantify the Badness of the i-th act of spying, Bi. Let's say we can further quantify the Goodness of the j-th act of Criminal-Thwarting as CTj. Our Net-Good Equation, then, is: NG = sum(CTj) - sum(Bi). If NG > 0, we're golden. If NG < 0, we need to fix things. In practice, it's sort of irrelevant, for the same reason the exact number of grains of sand to make a heap is irrelevant. A giant pile of sand doesn't stop being a heap just because a bunch of philosophers are wanking off about philosophical questions, and a terrible government policy doesn't stop being terrible just because you can't point to a single person and say, "There's where it went off the rails." But if you're into such wankery, there you go.
For the qualitative problem, it's a gradient, but it's not hard to observe the principle. The degree of extra information you can extract from a pile of data increases depending on how much data you have. If you have 10 data points, you can get a small degree of extra information. If you have 1M data points, you can get a lot of information out of it. It sort of rides the line between qualitative and quantitative, really - you can technically get information from a metadata analysis from even a small data set, it's just going to be so inaccurate as to be rather pointless. The more data you get, the more information you can extract with a large degree of accuracy and, thus, usefulness.
If you want to explore potentiality vs actuality, that can be avoided by considering that the potentiality is, itself, a problem, due to imperfect information on the part of the public. If I have pictures of you dressed in My Little Pony cosplay and fucking a stuffed giraffe, the simple fact that I have them is unsettling to you. I assume. You don't think, "Well, it's fine, because you haven't shown them to anyone yet." You don't know if I've shown them to anyone. You don't know if I plan to. Even if I promise you I will never show them to anyone, you are going to feel uncomfortable because you can never truly be sure that I won't. You certainly wouldn't argue about whether or not you should really be feeling stress because of the difference between potentiality and actuality - you would just want to get the fucking pics back so nobody finds out about you're crazy fetish.
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Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
In a legal context, what other than government / government powers can affect an individual's rights?
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
What else would a right be?
- What the government cannot do.
- What you can do, because the government cannot prevent it.
I fear you may have a god in your ontology who hands out rights.
There are more contexts than just the legal one, and you ignore them at your peril. If you are looking at the acquisition of personal data strictly from the standpoint of what the government can do with it, that's one thing, but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect, then you better be looking at the other side as well.
After all, the person afraid to speak because of reprisal from their employer is no freer than the person fearing government reprisal.
...What?
"but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect" Not sure what that, or most of your post, means. What is a "freedom aspect"?
If you're saying "there can be unjust laws" then...ok; you can say that. The question is how you justify that claim, the rubric by which you discern justice independent of the legal framework of a particular government / society. Presumably we want to make a distinction between "X is unjust" and "I do not like X", lest we become emotivists.
Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
In a legal context, what other than government / government powers can affect an individual's rights?
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
What else would a right be?
- What the government cannot do.
- What you can do, because the government cannot prevent it.
I fear you may have a god in your ontology who hands out rights.
There are more contexts than just the legal one, and you ignore them at your peril. If you are looking at the acquisition of personal data strictly from the standpoint of what the government can do with it, that's one thing, but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect, then you better be looking at the other side as well.
After all, the person afraid to speak because of reprisal from their employer is no freer than the person fearing government reprisal.
What would you make of the argument that it may be easier to tackle the private industry side of the problem once the state-side of the issue is taken care of? That enshrining protections against the state in law thus allows us to then apply those reasonings to the private sector in situations where the private sector can just as easily abuse the information [this also may be where what's going on with the FCC might be apropos?]
I'd argue that you have it backwards. Again, the root of the metadata problem is the third party doctrine, which states that third parties, with the exception of a few legal carve outs, have no obligation to you with regards to that data. Fix that issue, and you'll fix the state actor problem as well.
Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
In a legal context, what other than government / government powers can affect an individual's rights?
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
What else would a right be?
- What the government cannot do.
- What you can do, because the government cannot prevent it.
I fear you may have a god in your ontology who hands out rights.
There are more contexts than just the legal one, and you ignore them at your peril. If you are looking at the acquisition of personal data strictly from the standpoint of what the government can do with it, that's one thing, but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect, then you better be looking at the other side as well.
After all, the person afraid to speak because of reprisal from their employer is no freer than the person fearing government reprisal.
What would you make of the argument that it may be easier to tackle the private industry side of the problem once the state-side of the issue is taken care of? That enshrining protections against the state in law thus allows us to then apply those reasonings to the private sector in situations where the private sector can just as easily abuse the information [this also may be where what's going on with the FCC might be apropos?]
I'd argue that you have it backwards. Again, the root of the metadata problem is the third party doctrine, which states that third parties, with the exception of a few legal carve outs, have no obligation to you with regards to that data. Fix that issue, and you'll fix the state actor problem as well.
So how do we go about fixing it through that route? I assume doing that should help shore up the 4th Amendment protections to that data as well?
There are more contexts than just the legal one, and you ignore them at your peril. If you are looking at the acquisition of personal data strictly from the standpoint of what the government can do with it, that's one thing, but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect, then you better be looking at the other side as well.
After all, the person afraid to speak because of reprisal from their employer is no freer than the person fearing government reprisal.
There are also plenty of contexts where the state having laissez faire access to your personal details can be disastrous.
If you were ever accused of a crime, would you want the police to know what kind of porn you watch? What your fetishes are? Most people have one or two black tentacles dangling around somewhere, and even if you've never done anything illegal with those tentacles, the state can and will use them to hang you, discredit you, etc.
Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
In a legal context, what other than government / government powers can affect an individual's rights?
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
What else would a right be?
- What the government cannot do.
- What you can do, because the government cannot prevent it.
I fear you may have a god in your ontology who hands out rights.
There are more contexts than just the legal one, and you ignore them at your peril. If you are looking at the acquisition of personal data strictly from the standpoint of what the government can do with it, that's one thing, but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect, then you better be looking at the other side as well.
After all, the person afraid to speak because of reprisal from their employer is no freer than the person fearing government reprisal.
What would you make of the argument that it may be easier to tackle the private industry side of the problem once the state-side of the issue is taken care of? That enshrining protections against the state in law thus allows us to then apply those reasonings to the private sector in situations where the private sector can just as easily abuse the information [this also may be where what's going on with the FCC might be apropos?]
I'd say it's the opposite in most ways. It's the fact that private actors have all this information in the first place that lets the government so easily access it.
If your argument is the extent of the information governments can gather and the ease with which they can do that, it seems like alot of that goes straight back to the fact that these private actors have it all already gathered just sitting on servers waiting to be sent over.
Though some of this data needs to be gathered as a matter of course for the private actors, so it's always going to be there. This is, I think, part of the reason metadata doesn't require a warrant.
There is a lot wrong with this post, purely from a technical standpoint, but I'm not going to go into that. I'll just point out, once again, that you don't need to actively communicate with anyone in any way (phone call, text message or mobile internet) for your mobile phone to reveal your location. You still seem to think that location information is necessarily tied to phone calls or text messages. It isn't.
are they logging this information in advance without a warrant?
Metadata? Yes. It's only actual data itself (the texts or call logs) that require a warrant). Information like location or the fact that you sent a text to x number at y time from z location does not require a warrant and is picked up.
We're not debating whether or not the phone companies track the location of individual texts/calls.
We're debating Xrdd's claim that they are tracking people 24/7 and recording their location whether they make calls or not.
See, if you had just said "I don't understand how cell phone networks work and I won't listen to anyone who tries to explain them to me" right away, I could have saved myself the last few posts.
EDIT: It's been pointed out to you, repeatedly, that phone companies have this data. There are reasons why they would want to store it and no reasons for them to throw it away. Yet, you insist that they do. I'm almost scared to ask, since I'll probably get some nonsense answer about Snowden or the NSA or whatever, but why (apart from "I don't want this to be true!")?
You keep repeating this claim with no citation.
You also haven't explained the practical advantage of tracking people 24/7 rather than simply tracking their phone calls and texts. There are 300 million people in America, which means that phone companies have hundreds of millions of data points per day. If their goal is to gauge general trends track people for marketing purposes, then how in the world are hundreds of millions of data points per day insufficient?
When we conduct national polls for the Presidential race, we usually have only a thousand or so data points. And that's usually sufficient to get a pretty accurate position. Because that's how sampling and statistics work. You will pretty much never need a 100% sample. It's a waste of time and a waste of resources.
If the cell phone companies tracked my phone calls and texts for a month, then eventually they would get a pretty good idea of everywhere I've been. The more time I spend at a specific location, the more time I'll end up picking up the phone, and then they can gather a bunch of data from that. Tracking people 24/7 is more information. It also requires a lot more storage and a lot more processing power, and in the end, and it's actually counter productive because most of the information you gain is pretty worthless.
Basically, all you gain are a bunch of outliers. i.e., things that aren't part of my normal pattern, like if I take a 15 minute detour at the mall and don't make any calls. But how do they turn that into something they can sell? If your goal is to monitor mall traffic, then there are plenty of other who make phone calls while visiting the mall who they can sample. Why do they need to know that I visit the mall, if I happen to be an outlier?
The only reason to collection location data is for marketing purposes, in order to develop better marketing and service strategies. Since marketing and service strategies will always cater to general demographics and never to specific individuals, there is absolutely no reason to track specific individuals 24/7.
The only reason to track specific individuals 24/7 is if you intend to sell information on those specific individuals. i.e., if you intend to sell location logs to women who want to know if their husbands are cheating on them, or something along those lines. But if that market actually existed, then they would have to notify potential customers somehow, and eventually word of this service would get out.
I think a big difference between the government following you with a car or hiding in the bushes, versus the collection of data/metadata, has to do with ease of collection. I know that, right now, the government could be sitting outside my building, waiting for me to come out, and then they could drive behind me on my way home. But I doubt they're going to bother, partly because I don't think I've done anything worth spying on, and partly because it takes a lot of effort and manpower for them to spy on me. It would take at least one, maybe two people to keep constant surveillance on me. That is a huge expenditure of effort. Even though it's technically legal for the cops to follow me everywhere, or follow everyone everywhere, that's not going to happen because it's not physically possible for them to track everyone just to see if someone does something sketchy.
Electronic data collection, though? If we take this data collection and analysis to its logical conclusion, it comes down to clicking a button. Click, and now you have a sea of data on me and any number of other people. There may be technical limitations that prevent the government from literally spying on everyone, but they can at least spy on huge numbers of people with virtually no expenditure of resources. The fact that it's so easy is, itself, a problem. Because the justification for doing so shifts from "We are suspicious enough of this person to dedicate a large number of man-hours to tracking him" to "Eh, why not?"
Is that a theoretical/philosophical reason for it to be impermissible though?
Can something be a violation of Freedom of Expression solely because the government gets better at it or has more resources? Or Due process? Is it possible for something to be a perfectly acceptable violation of equal protection until it becomes common?
If storing the metadata of everyone's phone calls is a violation of privacy, storing one person's should be if we're talking about rights. If it only becomes objectionable because of the breadth of the program, then you're arguing about the implementation of the policy rather than the policy itself. If its OK to gather one person's metadata by a certain standard, it should be permissible to do so for everyone's. If N0 is not a violation, and Ni+1 doesn't provide a reason its a violation, then...
If storing the metadata of everyone when its easy is a violation of privacy, storing it when its difficult should be as well. But there's a long tradition and precedence of following someone to see who they talk to as being permissible without a warrant. I can't really see a situation where once you're good enough at tailing them, it becomes a violation of their privacy. Its not about giving someone a fair shot, its about expectation. If a single person doesn't have an expectation of privacy in regard to the people they communicate with through a third party, no one does.
In the programs we know about, a warrant was used to obtain the metadata. But I think the only way to make the whole thing impermissible is to show that the metadata is fundamentally different in some way to following you and seeing who you speak to in person. And I don't yet have a strong enough formulation for that.
It may or may not be an argument against the philosophy of the issue, and it may or may not be an argument against the constitutionality of the issue. It is absolutely an argument against the policy as currently implemented.
It's not like we have no precedent for things that are fine when one person does them, but not when everybody does them. One person deciding he can determine on his own when to ignore a crosswalk is not so much a problem; one million people is. One person throwing a paper wrapper on the ground is not a problem; one million people is.
And I think you're drawing a line between policy and implementation of same, when the two issues are not starkly divided. The nature of the data being collected means that how you're collecting it and why you're collecting it are tied together. The government is collecting millions of bits of data because the data is only meaningful when you collect millions of bits of it.
What it comes down to is that some of us are looking at the broad picture and saying, "The way this is going on, the entire picture taken together, is bad." And others are analyzing each tiny bit of the picture and saying, "Well, this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine, therefore if you combine them all it must still be fine." Except no, no, nononono. The wrongness with the situation is sort of an emergent behavior that doesn't exist until the whole picture comes together. It is a situation that is shittier than the sum of its parts.
But here, let's address the privacy issue directly. First off, I will state that I think the government tailing somebody who may or may not be guilty of anything is, itself, an invasion of privacy. Spying on someone in general, without their knowing, is an invasion of privacy. We don't allow it to happen because it's not in any way a bad thing, we allow it to happen because it is, in itself, a very small bad, weighted against the good thing of the government being able to catch criminals and prevent crime. Just like a single instance of our military accidentally shooting an innocent during a war is a bad thing, but is weighed against the greater good of, say, stopping a genocide.
When it is difficult for the government to spy on people, there's not really that much of a problem. A little oversight, and the difficulty of the process prevents in from becoming abused, or becoming an epidemic. The easier it is to spy, though, the more it becomes a problem. Instead of a few little bads being outweighed by a larger good, you have millions of little bads being weighed against a good that - let's be honest - isn't that much bigger than it was in the pre-digital age. If the government is spying on a thousand times more people, are we, as a society, a thousand times safer? I sure as hell don't feel a thousand times safer. I do feel a thousand times more likely to have strangers privy to details of my life that I might not want them to know.
When shooting innocents in a war becomes the rule rather than the exception, it makes you stop and think about what value you're getting out of this war of yours. You don't - or shouldn't - just shrug and say, "Well, one instance of accidental death isn't that big a deal, and we have to wage wars, right?" If all these new deaths are the result of some new tech - drones, say (and I'm not arguing against drones specifically, rather I'm just picking a piece of tech for sake of argument) - then maybe you should examine your use of that tech. And if turns out that it's impossible to use that tech without those huge costs, I think maybe not using the tech for that purpose anymore should be up for consideration.
I suppose this argument hinges upon the definition of spying on someone as an inherently bad thing. If you think spying on people is value-neutral, then you're probably not going to be convinced. But then, this would also mean that stalking someone would be value-neutral. If you think stalkers are doing something wrong, while spying is itself completely neutral, then maybe you should ask yourself why that is. Because that's a pretty big example of cognitive dissonance right there.
I think the simplest way to talk about the issue of ease of surveillance is that previously there were significant transactional costs to surveillance that imposed restrictions on it. Essentially, we've been taking a vague and contradictory stance on the issue BEFORE now because the costs made that possible. Now that fudge is gone and we are being forced to actually deal with the issue fully.
It reminds me alot of the intersection of copyright law and digital products. We used to be able to lean on the difficulty of reproducing vinyl or books in order to allow us to ignore the difference between the contents and the storage medium. Now, we can't.
A giant pile of sand doesn't stop being a heap just because a bunch of philosophers are wanking off about philosophical questions, and a terrible government policy doesn't stop being terrible just because you can't point to a single person and say, "There's where it went off the rails."
There is a question, and you begged it. If we start with the premise that X is a heap, it doesn't make sense to ask if X is a heap. When we start with the question of how we define a heap, we cannot discern whether or not X is a heap until we clearly articulate the definition of heap. That's the issue: You're starting with the premise that this government policy is terrible without first articulating the necessary and sufficient conditions that constitute terribleness.
I think your math formula would be a good start. The issue is that different persons have different notions of goodness, badness, terribleness, praiseworthyness, etc. When we try to assess NSA monitoring, in the context of 9/11 fear mongering and technologies that are completely estranged from the context in which the Constitution was constructed, it's a bit complicated.
For the qualitative problem, it's a gradient, but it's not hard to observe the principle. The degree of extra information you can extract from a pile of data increases depending on how much data you have. If you have 10 data points, you can get a small degree of extra information. If you have 1M data points, you can get a lot of information out of it. It sort of rides the line between qualitative and quantitative, really - you can technically get information from a metadata analysis from even a small data set, it's just going to be so inaccurate as to be rather pointless. The more data you get, the more information you can extract with a large degree of accuracy and, thus, usefulness.
This goes into your next point, but just to clarify, extracting information from data is separate and distinct from collecting data. If the data is collected, but never used to extract information, then whence the problem?
If you want to explore potentiality vs actuality, that can be avoided by considering that the potentiality is, itself, a problem, due to imperfect information on the part of the public. If I have pictures of you dressed in My Little Pony cosplay and fucking a stuffed giraffe, the simple fact that I have them is unsettling to you. I assume. You don't think, "Well, it's fine, because you haven't shown them to anyone yet." You don't know if I've shown them to anyone. You don't know if I plan to. Even if I promise you I will never show them to anyone, you are going to feel uncomfortable because you can never truly be sure that I won't. You certainly wouldn't argue about whether or not you should really be feeling stress because of the difference between potentiality and actuality - you would just want to get the fucking pics back so nobody finds out about you're crazy fetish.
As the individual who accused me of wielding “military-grade pedantry”, I would have expected you to be a better judge of your interlocutor.
I would make a distinction between:
- Having the picture.
- Making judgments based upon the picture.
- The consequences of the judgments, based upon the picture.
In debates about privacy (which this kinda is) I tend to point out that what people actually desire is not privacy-qua-privacy. It's not that, in this example, I want you to not have the information "_J_ likes to dress as a My Little Pony character and fuck a stuffed giraffe". What I want to avoid is the consequences of you making judgments of my character based upon that information.
Those are all different things: Knowing X. Interpreting X. Reacting to the interpretation of X. Acting based upon the reaction to the interpretation of X.
In the case of government surveillance, I do not care that they have bits of information about me in a database. I do not even care if particular individuals know of those bits of data. What I care about is persons acting upon that knowledge, dispensing punishments or restricting my actions or even making emotive assessments of my character based upon their interpretations of the data.
So, yeah. If everyone in the world had the information "_J_ does X" that would be fine. What is not fine is their making assessments of my character using that information, acting on that information, and reprimanding me based upon that information.
My guess is that, if pressed, you would agree that you have no opposition to their having the information. Your opposition is to their potentially using that information to harm you, directly or indirectly, in some way.
If you were ever accused of a crime, would you want the police to know what kind of porn you watch? What your fetishes are? Most people have one or two black tentacles dangling around somewhere, and even if you've never done anything illegal with those tentacles, the state can and will use them to hang you, discredit you, etc.
See? The problem is not their having the information, and so an issue of privacy. The problem is their using said information to punish.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I disagree that any cognitive dissonance is required to maintain that the government may spy but private actors may not stalk. We entrust the government with the power to umpridon and kill people, but would not allow private individuals to so the same.
I disagree that any cognitive dissonance is required to maintain that the government may spy but private actors may not stalk. We entrust the government with the power to umpridon and kill people, but would not allow private individuals to so the same.
It's no more cognitively dissonant than maintaining police officers, fire department folks, and ambulances can drive over the speed limit without getting punished, sometimes, but regular folks are subject to speed limits.
Though he won't say it, he doesn't believe that the database is itself a problem. He doesn't care whether you can build up an exhaustive map of all the intersections of all the people at all the times, that you can join it with CC data and browsing habits to reveal new information, and so forth. This is why he jumped straight to talking about detective TV and speculation about how inefficient AI "tends to be".
Like, you know, he's had some experience with AI that isn't inefficient, but hey, it tends to be that way. He's a dude that knows. You can tell because he's expressing his speculation in language that suggests he's noticed a trend.
Government collects a database and draws new conclusions from it. You haven't actually explained where the violation is.
Is the violation the collection itself, or is the violation the ability to use deductive reasoning?
If only I had explained where the violation was twice already, then you wouldn't have to make posts like this.
You clearly have a poor to nonexistent grasp on information theory. I have made not one, but two posts on this that you have quoted, which means I assume you read them. What don't you understand about them? Which words/concepts are you having trouble with? Is how a single collection of complete data is totally different beast from several collections of incomplete data?
The act of combining multiple databases into a single one is the act of privacy violation. The collection is done by google/yahoo/Microsoft/verizon, it is not only lawful, but required for them to perform their functions. The combination of them is done by government without a warrant. Once the database is combined it contains information not held by any of the other databases precombination. The creation and storing of information for which I have an expectation of privacy should require a warrant.
I understand what you're trying to say. I don't agree with your premise.
You're basically saying that if the government combines two sources of information, and reaches a conclusion that could not have been reached by either source alone, then it constitutes an invasion of privacy.
The idea is that if you wanted to keep a piece of information secret, and it can't be discovered via a single source, then discovering that piece of information via multiple sources is somehow an invasion of privacy. That somehow, combining two lawfully collected pieces of information results in an unlawful piece of information.
And the logical transformation between "lawful" to "unlawful" requires a greater justification than "You learned something that people didn't want you to learn." The ability to see patterns from different sources of information requires intuition. You're basically outlawing intuition in general.
Also, it's pretty arbitrary to say that it's an invasion of privacy if you and your mistress subscribe to different phone companies, but not if you subscribe to the same phone company.
EDIT: It's been pointed out to you, repeatedly, that phone companies have this data. There are reasons why they would want to store it and no reasons for them to throw it away. Yet, you insist that they do. I'm almost scared to ask, since I'll probably get some nonsense answer about Snowden or the NSA or whatever, but why (apart from "I don't want this to be true!")?
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
It doesn't matter why they might be doing it, because they are demonstrably doing it.
If the cell phone companies tracked my phone calls and texts for a month, then eventually they would get a pretty good idea of everywhere I've been. The more time I spend at a specific location, the more time I'll end up picking up the phone, and then they can gather a bunch of data from that. Tracking people 24/7 is more information.
Yes. Exactly. Thank you for spelling out the point we are making.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I was about to say "Um, isn't that location data just which tower the cell phone is using, which is vital to actually using a cellphone?" and then realised the article says that's exactly what it is:
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.
And "which tower you are closest to" or something like that is all they can really track without you turning the GPS of the phone on. Although the article itself, like all this shit, is incredibly unclear on what exactly is being tracked here.
EDIT: It's been pointed out to you, repeatedly, that phone companies have this data. There are reasons why they would want to store it and no reasons for them to throw it away. Yet, you insist that they do. I'm almost scared to ask, since I'll probably get some nonsense answer about Snowden or the NSA or whatever, but why (apart from "I don't want this to be true!")?
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
It doesn't matter why they might be doing it, because they are demonstrably doing it.
If the cell phone companies tracked my phone calls and texts for a month, then eventually they would get a pretty good idea of everywhere I've been. The more time I spend at a specific location, the more time I'll end up picking up the phone, and then they can gather a bunch of data from that. Tracking people 24/7 is more information.
Yes. Exactly. Thank you for spelling out the point we are making.
Incidentally, I linked the Malte Spitz stuff days ago in the NSA thread when "discussing" telephony metadata with Schrodinger, specifically this visualization of the data: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
I was about to say "Um, isn't that location data just which tower the cell phone is using, which is vital to actually using a cellphone?" and then realised the article says that's exactly what it is:
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.
And "which tower you are closest to" or something like that is all they can really track without you turning the GPS of the phone on. Although the article itself, like all this shit, is incredibly unclear on what exactly is being tracked here.
It's a little bit more than which tower you are closest to. According to this article (german) by one of the guys who created the visualization, the data contains the nearest tower and the approximate direction the phone is in from the tower. In cities, where the distances between cell towers are fairly small, this gives you a pretty accurate location, in the country it's not very precise.
I was about to say "Um, isn't that location data just which tower the cell phone is using, which is vital to actually using a cellphone?" and then realised the article says that's exactly what it is:
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.
And "which tower you are closest to" or something like that is all they can really track without you turning the GPS of the phone on. Although the article itself, like all this shit, is incredibly unclear on what exactly is being tracked here.
Another article I read mentioned they can also register the strength of the signal and use that to determine how far from the tower you are. Knowing you're X meters from tower Y gives a pretty accurate idea of where you are, especially if that data is constantly being updated.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
EDIT: It's been pointed out to you, repeatedly, that phone companies have this data. There are reasons why they would want to store it and no reasons for them to throw it away. Yet, you insist that they do. I'm almost scared to ask, since I'll probably get some nonsense answer about Snowden or the NSA or whatever, but why (apart from "I don't want this to be true!")?
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
It doesn't matter why they might be doing it, because they are demonstrably doing it.
If the cell phone companies tracked my phone calls and texts for a month, then eventually they would get a pretty good idea of everywhere I've been. The more time I spend at a specific location, the more time I'll end up picking up the phone, and then they can gather a bunch of data from that. Tracking people 24/7 is more information.
Yes. Exactly. Thank you for spelling out the point we are making.
As a counterpoint, I'll refer to the case where a defendant submitted a request for his location data to the NSA (and was told that the NSA did not have it) - he did this because his provider no longer had the location data themselves.
So, is the issue the gathering of the data, or the retention?
@Schrodinger I sincerely suggest that you dedicate a significant amount of time to understanding the State Actor doctrine, a foundational piece of the American legal system, before you decide whether to continue with besides-the-point comparisons between private actors and government actors.
I find the state actor argument to be a very dangerous one with regard to actual freedom.
It's not an argument; it's an uncontroversial and longstanding rule that governs whether many American rights apply to a particular situation.
Yes it is an argument. Specifically a legal argument. But, of course, since we know that what is legal =/= what is right (we even had a thread on this) an argument that simply stops at what is legal is an incredibly poor one.
AngelHedgie's whole, very good, point is that the whole "State Actor doctrine" is itself dangerously short-sighted.
It seems especially naive in today's world where the power and influence of non-state actors is so incredibly high and incredibly well known.
No.
It is nonsensical to point at black-letter law and call it a legal argument; it would be a very similar error to call the First Amendment a legal argument.
Dude, you are referencing a law. It is a legal argument.
You are arguing about what is legal or what could be legal, not what should be.
The State-Actor Doctrine is a purely legal american framing, and it's a rather stupid one.
The doctrine is not a "legal American framing", whatever that is supposed to mean; the State actor doctrine is just shorthand for something that the US Constitution says in pretty plain language.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, just that it exists and Schrodinger frequently misunderstands how it works.
If you insist on misunderstanding this, too, then there's nothing else I can say.
I made a game! Hotline Maui. Requires mouse and keyboard.
@Schrodinger I sincerely suggest that you dedicate a significant amount of time to understanding the State Actor doctrine, a foundational piece of the American legal system, before you decide whether to continue with besides-the-point comparisons between private actors and government actors.
I find the state actor argument to be a very dangerous one with regard to actual freedom.
It's not an argument; it's an uncontroversial and longstanding rule that governs whether many American rights apply to a particular situation.
Yes it is an argument. Specifically a legal argument. But, of course, since we know that what is legal =/= what is right (we even had a thread on this) an argument that simply stops at what is legal is an incredibly poor one.
AngelHedgie's whole, very good, point is that the whole "State Actor doctrine" is itself dangerously short-sighted.
It seems especially naive in today's world where the power and influence of non-state actors is so incredibly high and incredibly well known.
No.
It is nonsensical to point at black-letter law and call it a legal argument; it would be a very similar error to call the First Amendment a legal argument.
Dude, you are referencing a law. It is a legal argument.
You are arguing about what is legal or what could be legal, not what should be.
The State-Actor Doctrine is a purely legal american framing, and it's a rather stupid one.
The doctrine is not a "legal American framing", whatever that is supposed to mean; the State actor doctrine is just shorthand for something that the US Constitution says in pretty plain language.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, just that it exists and Schrodinger frequently misunderstands how it works.
If you insist on misunderstanding this, too, then there's nothing else I can say.
You are the only one misunderstanding here. See AngelHedgie's post above if you want another rephrasing of the same point.
We know it's something the US Constitution says. That's why it's an argument about what the law says, which isn't relevant to the argument actually being made (except, perhaps, in that the law says something stupid and limited)
I was about to say "Um, isn't that location data just which tower the cell phone is using, which is vital to actually using a cellphone?" and then realised the article says that's exactly what it is:
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.
And "which tower you are closest to" or something like that is all they can really track without you turning the GPS of the phone on. Although the article itself, like all this shit, is incredibly unclear on what exactly is being tracked here.
Another article I read mentioned they can also register the strength of the signal and use that to determine how far from the tower you are. Knowing you're X meters from tower Y gives a pretty accurate idea of where you are, especially if that data is constantly being updated.
EDIT: It's been pointed out to you, repeatedly, that phone companies have this data. There are reasons why they would want to store it and no reasons for them to throw it away. Yet, you insist that they do. I'm almost scared to ask, since I'll probably get some nonsense answer about Snowden or the NSA or whatever, but why (apart from "I don't want this to be true!")?
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
It doesn't matter why they might be doing it, because they are demonstrably doing it.
If the cell phone companies tracked my phone calls and texts for a month, then eventually they would get a pretty good idea of everywhere I've been. The more time I spend at a specific location, the more time I'll end up picking up the phone, and then they can gather a bunch of data from that. Tracking people 24/7 is more information.
Yes. Exactly. Thank you for spelling out the point we are making.
35,000 data points over 6 months = 200 data points per day.
If the guy is a busy professional/politician, then it's perfectly feasible to be using your phone 200 times per day.
The question is, how many data points would you expect from live 24/7 non-stop tracking?
@Schrodinger I sincerely suggest that you dedicate a significant amount of time to understanding the State Actor doctrine, a foundational piece of the American legal system, before you decide whether to continue with besides-the-point comparisons between private actors and government actors.
I find the state actor argument to be a very dangerous one with regard to actual freedom.
It's not an argument; it's an uncontroversial and longstanding rule that governs whether many American rights apply to a particular situation.
Yes it is an argument. Specifically a legal argument. But, of course, since we know that what is legal =/= what is right (we even had a thread on this) an argument that simply stops at what is legal is an incredibly poor one.
AngelHedgie's whole, very good, point is that the whole "State Actor doctrine" is itself dangerously short-sighted.
It seems especially naive in today's world where the power and influence of non-state actors is so incredibly high and incredibly well known.
No.
It is nonsensical to point at black-letter law and call it a legal argument; it would be a very similar error to call the First Amendment a legal argument.
Dude, you are referencing a law. It is a legal argument.
You are arguing about what is legal or what could be legal, not what should be.
The State-Actor Doctrine is a purely legal american framing, and it's a rather stupid one.
The doctrine is not a "legal American framing", whatever that is supposed to mean; the State actor doctrine is just shorthand for something that the US Constitution says in pretty plain language.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, just that it exists and Schrodinger frequently misunderstands how it works.
If you insist on misunderstanding this, too, then there's nothing else I can say.
The point is that it's a shortsighted view, especially in light of the power that non-state actors can wield. A person afraid of retribution from their employer for speaking out is just as repressed as the person afraid of retribution from the state. Even worse, it is possible for the state to "launder" itself through non-state actors, getting around the safeguards of power.
@Schrodinger I sincerely suggest that you dedicate a significant amount of time to understanding the State Actor doctrine, a foundational piece of the American legal system, before you decide whether to continue with besides-the-point comparisons between private actors and government actors.
I find the state actor argument to be a very dangerous one with regard to actual freedom.
It's not an argument; it's an uncontroversial and longstanding rule that governs whether many American rights apply to a particular situation.
Yes it is an argument. Specifically a legal argument. But, of course, since we know that what is legal =/= what is right (we even had a thread on this) an argument that simply stops at what is legal is an incredibly poor one.
AngelHedgie's whole, very good, point is that the whole "State Actor doctrine" is itself dangerously short-sighted.
It seems especially naive in today's world where the power and influence of non-state actors is so incredibly high and incredibly well known.
No.
It is nonsensical to point at black-letter law and call it a legal argument; it would be a very similar error to call the First Amendment a legal argument.
Dude, you are referencing a law. It is a legal argument.
You are arguing about what is legal or what could be legal, not what should be.
The State-Actor Doctrine is a purely legal american framing, and it's a rather stupid one.
The doctrine is not a "legal American framing", whatever that is supposed to mean; the State actor doctrine is just shorthand for something that the US Constitution says in pretty plain language.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, just that it exists and Schrodinger frequently misunderstands how it works.
If you insist on misunderstanding this, too, then there's nothing else I can say.
The point is that it's a shortsighted view, especially in light of the power that non-state actors can wield. A person afraid of retribution from their employer for speaking out is just as repressed as the person afraid of retribution from the state. Even worse, it is possible for the state to "launder" itself through non-state actors, getting around the safeguards of power.
Which is kind of interesting in this very context. The government doesn't need to read every email you've ever written. Google already does it for them.
Posts
Is that a theoretical/philosophical reason for it to be impermissible though?
Can something be a violation of Freedom of Expression solely because the government gets better at it or has more resources? Or Due process? Is it possible for something to be a perfectly acceptable violation of equal protection until it becomes common?
If storing the metadata of everyone's phone calls is a violation of privacy, storing one person's should be if we're talking about rights. If it only becomes objectionable because of the breadth of the program, then you're arguing about the implementation of the policy rather than the policy itself. If its OK to gather one person's metadata by a certain standard, it should be permissible to do so for everyone's. If N0 is not a violation, and Ni+1 doesn't provide a reason its a violation, then...
If storing the metadata of everyone when its easy is a violation of privacy, storing it when its difficult should be as well. But there's a long tradition and precedence of following someone to see who they talk to as being permissible without a warrant. I can't really see a situation where once you're good enough at tailing them, it becomes a violation of their privacy. Its not about giving someone a fair shot, its about expectation. If a single person doesn't have an expectation of privacy in regard to the people they communicate with through a third party, no one does.
In the programs we know about, a warrant was used to obtain the metadata. But I think the only way to make the whole thing impermissible is to show that the metadata is fundamentally different in some way to following you and seeing who you speak to in person. And I don't yet have a strong enough formulation for that.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Dude, you are referencing a law. It is a legal argument.
You are arguing about what is legal or what could be legal, not what should be.
The State-Actor Doctrine is a purely legal american framing, and it's a rather stupid one.
a knife is a terribly ineffective weapon of mass destruction. would you argue that nukes should be sold at walmart because all they do is make it faster and easier to kill a million people than an unregulated knife?
when it is effortless to violate the peoples liberty, steps must be taken to keep away the temptation.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UChq0-eLNiMaJlIjqerf0v2A? <-- Game related youtube stuff
http://galdon.newgrounds.com/games/ <-- games I've made. (spoiler warning: They might suck!)
You completely missed the point. Like to the point where you didn't just fail to catch the ball, you're playing an entirely different sport.
To try and wedge some semblance of a connection into your ham-fisted metaphor, Pants is saying that killing one person with a knife should not be considered trivial just because it was harder to do than using some other weapon.
I disagree. Its a necessary one in a system that acknowledges fundamental liberties and limitations on governmental power.
Actions taken by the government are fundamentally different than private actions, even by the wealthy and influential. The reasons for limiting in the former may be pragmatic, or may be philosophical. Society may or may not run more smoothly with racial discrimination by the government, but the philosophically that is not permissible. In order to further the goals of society, similar restrictions on private action may be enacted (Fair Housing Act for instance), but those are policy decisions built on a pragmatic intent to produce a more just society.
They are related but not identical. The former is an inherent restriction placed on the government that says while you are attempting to further your goals, you are not permitted to utilize the following methods. The latter is a method being used to further a goal informed by the same philosophical paradigm.
A person has the right to sue the government and say it violated its own fundamental laws. One doesn't have the right to sue and say the laws aren't optimal.
If freedom of speech or anti-discrimination is all policy, none of it can be challenged fundamentally, and all of it is up for debate the next time the goals, or those who decide what the goals are, change.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
the having of a knife is not illegal because it is fairly unlikely that owning a knife will make you a murderer, and there are legit uses for knives.
likewise, police detectives, restrained by resources and laws are useful for solving crimes and minimally exploitable.
on the other hand, nukes are good at stopping wars, but make mass murder trivially easy. The UN has strict rules on possessing them for that reason. (though they might want to actually enforce those rules someday)
likewise, a tool that collects data automatically in mass about basically everyone might be useful for some legit things, but the incredible ease with which you can learn everything worth learning about a person makes the potential for mass violations of liberty a major concern.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UChq0-eLNiMaJlIjqerf0v2A? <-- Game related youtube stuff
http://galdon.newgrounds.com/games/ <-- games I've made. (spoiler warning: They might suck!)
It may or may not be an argument against the philosophy of the issue, and it may or may not be an argument against the constitutionality of the issue. It is absolutely an argument against the policy as currently implemented.
It's not like we have no precedent for things that are fine when one person does them, but not when everybody does them. One person deciding he can determine on his own when to ignore a crosswalk is not so much a problem; one million people is. One person throwing a paper wrapper on the ground is not a problem; one million people is.
And I think you're drawing a line between policy and implementation of same, when the two issues are not starkly divided. The nature of the data being collected means that how you're collecting it and why you're collecting it are tied together. The government is collecting millions of bits of data because the data is only meaningful when you collect millions of bits of it.
What it comes down to is that some of us are looking at the broad picture and saying, "The way this is going on, the entire picture taken together, is bad." And others are analyzing each tiny bit of the picture and saying, "Well, this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine by itself, and this bit is fine, therefore if you combine them all it must still be fine." Except no, no, nononono. The wrongness with the situation is sort of an emergent behavior that doesn't exist until the whole picture comes together. It is a situation that is shittier than the sum of its parts.
But here, let's address the privacy issue directly. First off, I will state that I think the government tailing somebody who may or may not be guilty of anything is, itself, an invasion of privacy. Spying on someone in general, without their knowing, is an invasion of privacy. We don't allow it to happen because it's not in any way a bad thing, we allow it to happen because it is, in itself, a very small bad, weighted against the good thing of the government being able to catch criminals and prevent crime. Just like a single instance of our military accidentally shooting an innocent during a war is a bad thing, but is weighed against the greater good of, say, stopping a genocide.
When it is difficult for the government to spy on people, there's not really that much of a problem. A little oversight, and the difficulty of the process prevents in from becoming abused, or becoming an epidemic. The easier it is to spy, though, the more it becomes a problem. Instead of a few little bads being outweighed by a larger good, you have millions of little bads being weighed against a good that - let's be honest - isn't that much bigger than it was in the pre-digital age. If the government is spying on a thousand times more people, are we, as a society, a thousand times safer? I sure as hell don't feel a thousand times safer. I do feel a thousand times more likely to have strangers privy to details of my life that I might not want them to know.
When shooting innocents in a war becomes the rule rather than the exception, it makes you stop and think about what value you're getting out of this war of yours. You don't - or shouldn't - just shrug and say, "Well, one instance of accidental death isn't that big a deal, and we have to wage wars, right?" If all these new deaths are the result of some new tech - drones, say (and I'm not arguing against drones specifically, rather I'm just picking a piece of tech for sake of argument) - then maybe you should examine your use of that tech. And if turns out that it's impossible to use that tech without those huge costs, I think maybe not using the tech for that purpose anymore should be up for consideration.
I suppose this argument hinges upon the definition of spying on someone as an inherently bad thing. If you think spying on people is value-neutral, then you're probably not going to be convinced. But then, this would also mean that stalking someone would be value-neutral. If you think stalkers are doing something wrong, while spying is itself completely neutral, then maybe you should ask yourself why that is. Because that's a pretty big example of cognitive dissonance right there.
There are times when a difference in quantity manifests a difference in quality, both ethically and legally. Genocide, for example, is a lot of murder, but we treat it as something qualitatively different from a heap of murders.
You are correct that we need to be clear about our grievances, and articulate the exact problem. It could be that the wrongness of collecting data on 100,000 people is nothing more than heaping the wrongness of collecting data on 1 person 100,000 times. Or, it could be that the quantitative shift results in a change in quality, as well. So, collecting data on 100,000 people is not merely a multiplication of what happens when data is collected from one individual.
It seems that, practically, the ease of data collection, in this case, does manifest a difference. The government is not hiring 100,000 private detectives to follow us. There are differences in cost, differences in method, differences of means, differences of difficulty, differences of scope, etc.
If we limit this to only electronic surveillance through data collection, I do not know if the increase in quantity results in a difference in quality. At the moment, I am inclined to say that electronically spying on 100,000 people is significantly qualitatively different from electronically spying on one person. That seems to be the initial impression of most folks.
The trick is to suss out what, exactly, the difference is. Because, as you say, "there's more of it!" is merely a quantitative distinction. We need to articulate the exact change in quality to support Jeffe's point.
To be fair to Pants, the heaping problem is a difficult problem. He could turn around and ask you to articulate the exact number of data-bits required to move from the "ok" level of data collection to the "oh noes!" level.
If you do maintain that "The wrongness with the situation is sort of an emergent behavior that doesn't exist until the whole picture comes together", you would need to articulate why the "whole picture" manifests wrongness.
Collecting 1 byte of data, that's ok.
Collecting 2 bytes of data, that's ok.
...
Collecting 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, that's not ok.
Something changed between the 1 and the 1,000,000,000,000,000. Pants is able to maintain consistency throughout, since the ok-ness of the 1 continues through to the 1,000,000,000,000,000. If you think something changes in quality, based on the change in quantity, you need to articulate where, exactly, the change occurs.
Good luck with that.
Edit: I guess you could skirt the heaping problem by declaring that data collection is bad "when it is useful for discerning X, Y, or Z", but then the wrongness is found in the use of data, rather than its being collected. If you want the data collection, in itself, to be problematic you need to articulate a means of discerning the problematic possibilities from the unproblematic actualities: "This data could be used to discern X, Y, or Z."
So, the distinction between quality and quantity, the heaping problem, and the distinction between potentiality and actuality. Three very simple philosophical problems all smashed together.
It's the opposite. Any system that wants to talk about fundamental liberties has to talk about something beyond merely government powers because the government is not the only thing that can affect your rights.
What you propose is a classical liberal view of the issue, which fits with the constitution as originally written (given the time it was written) but is pretty fucking stupid overall.
This is terrible reasoning. And circular, since you are using this idea of "this is policy" while basing this solely on the conclusion you are trying to show (ie - that government and private actions are fundamentally different and that private actions are only restricted as a matter of policy).
Your rights aren't fundamental if private actors can violate them. Unless you conceive of rights as solely "what the government cannot do", which is the whole problem because that's a stupid, limited framing.
This part doesn't even make any sense. Maybe it's semi-coherent in light of the faulty argument that precedes it, but even then.
In a legal context, what other than government / government powers can affect an individual's rights?
What else would a right be?
- What the government cannot do.
- What you can do, because the government cannot prevent it.
I fear you may have a god in your ontology who hands out rights.
There are more contexts than just the legal one, and you ignore them at your peril. If you are looking at the acquisition of personal data strictly from the standpoint of what the government can do with it, that's one thing, but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect, then you better be looking at the other side as well.
After all, the person afraid to speak because of reprisal from their employer is no freer than the person fearing government reprisal.
What would you make of the argument that it may be easier to tackle the private industry side of the problem once the state-side of the issue is taken care of? That enshrining protections against the state in law thus allows us to then apply those reasonings to the private sector in situations where the private sector can just as easily abuse the information [this also may be where what's going on with the FCC might be apropos?]
There are several ways to address this, even adhering to the conditions you set out.
For the heaping problem, let's posit that we can quantify the Badness of the i-th act of spying, Bi. Let's say we can further quantify the Goodness of the j-th act of Criminal-Thwarting as CTj. Our Net-Good Equation, then, is: NG = sum(CTj) - sum(Bi). If NG > 0, we're golden. If NG < 0, we need to fix things. In practice, it's sort of irrelevant, for the same reason the exact number of grains of sand to make a heap is irrelevant. A giant pile of sand doesn't stop being a heap just because a bunch of philosophers are wanking off about philosophical questions, and a terrible government policy doesn't stop being terrible just because you can't point to a single person and say, "There's where it went off the rails." But if you're into such wankery, there you go.
For the qualitative problem, it's a gradient, but it's not hard to observe the principle. The degree of extra information you can extract from a pile of data increases depending on how much data you have. If you have 10 data points, you can get a small degree of extra information. If you have 1M data points, you can get a lot of information out of it. It sort of rides the line between qualitative and quantitative, really - you can technically get information from a metadata analysis from even a small data set, it's just going to be so inaccurate as to be rather pointless. The more data you get, the more information you can extract with a large degree of accuracy and, thus, usefulness.
If you want to explore potentiality vs actuality, that can be avoided by considering that the potentiality is, itself, a problem, due to imperfect information on the part of the public. If I have pictures of you dressed in My Little Pony cosplay and fucking a stuffed giraffe, the simple fact that I have them is unsettling to you. I assume. You don't think, "Well, it's fine, because you haven't shown them to anyone yet." You don't know if I've shown them to anyone. You don't know if I plan to. Even if I promise you I will never show them to anyone, you are going to feel uncomfortable because you can never truly be sure that I won't. You certainly wouldn't argue about whether or not you should really be feeling stress because of the difference between potentiality and actuality - you would just want to get the fucking pics back so nobody finds out about you're crazy fetish.
...What?
"but if you are looking at this from a freedom aspect" Not sure what that, or most of your post, means. What is a "freedom aspect"?
If you're saying "there can be unjust laws" then...ok; you can say that. The question is how you justify that claim, the rubric by which you discern justice independent of the legal framework of a particular government / society. Presumably we want to make a distinction between "X is unjust" and "I do not like X", lest we become emotivists.
I'd argue that you have it backwards. Again, the root of the metadata problem is the third party doctrine, which states that third parties, with the exception of a few legal carve outs, have no obligation to you with regards to that data. Fix that issue, and you'll fix the state actor problem as well.
So how do we go about fixing it through that route? I assume doing that should help shore up the 4th Amendment protections to that data as well?
There are also plenty of contexts where the state having laissez faire access to your personal details can be disastrous.
If you were ever accused of a crime, would you want the police to know what kind of porn you watch? What your fetishes are? Most people have one or two black tentacles dangling around somewhere, and even if you've never done anything illegal with those tentacles, the state can and will use them to hang you, discredit you, etc.
I'd say it's the opposite in most ways. It's the fact that private actors have all this information in the first place that lets the government so easily access it.
If your argument is the extent of the information governments can gather and the ease with which they can do that, it seems like alot of that goes straight back to the fact that these private actors have it all already gathered just sitting on servers waiting to be sent over.
Though some of this data needs to be gathered as a matter of course for the private actors, so it's always going to be there. This is, I think, part of the reason metadata doesn't require a warrant.
We're not debating whether or not the phone companies track the location of individual texts/calls.
We're debating Xrdd's claim that they are tracking people 24/7 and recording their location whether they make calls or not.
That's a very, very bold claim.
You keep repeating this claim with no citation.
You also haven't explained the practical advantage of tracking people 24/7 rather than simply tracking their phone calls and texts. There are 300 million people in America, which means that phone companies have hundreds of millions of data points per day. If their goal is to gauge general trends track people for marketing purposes, then how in the world are hundreds of millions of data points per day insufficient?
When we conduct national polls for the Presidential race, we usually have only a thousand or so data points. And that's usually sufficient to get a pretty accurate position. Because that's how sampling and statistics work. You will pretty much never need a 100% sample. It's a waste of time and a waste of resources.
If the cell phone companies tracked my phone calls and texts for a month, then eventually they would get a pretty good idea of everywhere I've been. The more time I spend at a specific location, the more time I'll end up picking up the phone, and then they can gather a bunch of data from that. Tracking people 24/7 is more information. It also requires a lot more storage and a lot more processing power, and in the end, and it's actually counter productive because most of the information you gain is pretty worthless.
Basically, all you gain are a bunch of outliers. i.e., things that aren't part of my normal pattern, like if I take a 15 minute detour at the mall and don't make any calls. But how do they turn that into something they can sell? If your goal is to monitor mall traffic, then there are plenty of other who make phone calls while visiting the mall who they can sample. Why do they need to know that I visit the mall, if I happen to be an outlier?
The only reason to collection location data is for marketing purposes, in order to develop better marketing and service strategies. Since marketing and service strategies will always cater to general demographics and never to specific individuals, there is absolutely no reason to track specific individuals 24/7.
The only reason to track specific individuals 24/7 is if you intend to sell information on those specific individuals. i.e., if you intend to sell location logs to women who want to know if their husbands are cheating on them, or something along those lines. But if that market actually existed, then they would have to notify potential customers somehow, and eventually word of this service would get out.
I think the simplest way to talk about the issue of ease of surveillance is that previously there were significant transactional costs to surveillance that imposed restrictions on it. Essentially, we've been taking a vague and contradictory stance on the issue BEFORE now because the costs made that possible. Now that fudge is gone and we are being forced to actually deal with the issue fully.
It reminds me alot of the intersection of copyright law and digital products. We used to be able to lean on the difficulty of reproducing vinyl or books in order to allow us to ignore the difference between the contents and the storage medium. Now, we can't.
There is a question, and you begged it. If we start with the premise that X is a heap, it doesn't make sense to ask if X is a heap. When we start with the question of how we define a heap, we cannot discern whether or not X is a heap until we clearly articulate the definition of heap. That's the issue: You're starting with the premise that this government policy is terrible without first articulating the necessary and sufficient conditions that constitute terribleness.
I think your math formula would be a good start. The issue is that different persons have different notions of goodness, badness, terribleness, praiseworthyness, etc. When we try to assess NSA monitoring, in the context of 9/11 fear mongering and technologies that are completely estranged from the context in which the Constitution was constructed, it's a bit complicated.
This goes into your next point, but just to clarify, extracting information from data is separate and distinct from collecting data. If the data is collected, but never used to extract information, then whence the problem?
As the individual who accused me of wielding “military-grade pedantry”, I would have expected you to be a better judge of your interlocutor.
I would make a distinction between:
- Having the picture.
- Making judgments based upon the picture.
- The consequences of the judgments, based upon the picture.
In debates about privacy (which this kinda is) I tend to point out that what people actually desire is not privacy-qua-privacy. It's not that, in this example, I want you to not have the information "_J_ likes to dress as a My Little Pony character and fuck a stuffed giraffe". What I want to avoid is the consequences of you making judgments of my character based upon that information.
Those are all different things: Knowing X. Interpreting X. Reacting to the interpretation of X. Acting based upon the reaction to the interpretation of X.
In the case of government surveillance, I do not care that they have bits of information about me in a database. I do not even care if particular individuals know of those bits of data. What I care about is persons acting upon that knowledge, dispensing punishments or restricting my actions or even making emotive assessments of my character based upon their interpretations of the data.
So, yeah. If everyone in the world had the information "_J_ does X" that would be fine. What is not fine is their making assessments of my character using that information, acting on that information, and reprimanding me based upon that information.
My guess is that, if pressed, you would agree that you have no opposition to their having the information. Your opposition is to their potentially using that information to harm you, directly or indirectly, in some way.
Edit:
See? The problem is not their having the information, and so an issue of privacy. The problem is their using said information to punish.
It's no more cognitively dissonant than maintaining police officers, fire department folks, and ambulances can drive over the speed limit without getting punished, sometimes, but regular folks are subject to speed limits.
I understand what you're trying to say. I don't agree with your premise.
You're basically saying that if the government combines two sources of information, and reaches a conclusion that could not have been reached by either source alone, then it constitutes an invasion of privacy.
The idea is that if you wanted to keep a piece of information secret, and it can't be discovered via a single source, then discovering that piece of information via multiple sources is somehow an invasion of privacy. That somehow, combining two lawfully collected pieces of information results in an unlawful piece of information.
And the logical transformation between "lawful" to "unlawful" requires a greater justification than "You learned something that people didn't want you to learn." The ability to see patterns from different sources of information requires intuition. You're basically outlawing intuition in general.
Also, it's pretty arbitrary to say that it's an invasion of privacy if you and your mistress subscribe to different phone companies, but not if you subscribe to the same phone company.
Oh for fucks sake, dude.
Here is your evidence. It took almost 30 seconds to find via Google.
It doesn't matter why they might be doing it, because they are demonstrably doing it.
Yes. Exactly. Thank you for spelling out the point we are making.
And "which tower you are closest to" or something like that is all they can really track without you turning the GPS of the phone on. Although the article itself, like all this shit, is incredibly unclear on what exactly is being tracked here.
Incidentally, I linked the Malte Spitz stuff days ago in the NSA thread when "discussing" telephony metadata with Schrodinger, specifically this visualization of the data: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
EDIT:
It's a little bit more than which tower you are closest to. According to this article (german) by one of the guys who created the visualization, the data contains the nearest tower and the approximate direction the phone is in from the tower. In cities, where the distances between cell towers are fairly small, this gives you a pretty accurate location, in the country it's not very precise.
Raw data (minus phone numbers he called and other private information) is here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An0YnoiCbFHGdGp3WnJkbE4xWTdDTVV0ZDlQeWZmSXc&hl=en_GB&authkey=COCjw-kG#gid=0
Another article I read mentioned they can also register the strength of the signal and use that to determine how far from the tower you are. Knowing you're X meters from tower Y gives a pretty accurate idea of where you are, especially if that data is constantly being updated.
edit: Here, you can see exactly what was being tracked in the case of Spitz.
As a counterpoint, I'll refer to the case where a defendant submitted a request for his location data to the NSA (and was told that the NSA did not have it) - he did this because his provider no longer had the location data themselves.
So, is the issue the gathering of the data, or the retention?
@Shryke
The doctrine is not a "legal American framing", whatever that is supposed to mean; the State actor doctrine is just shorthand for something that the US Constitution says in pretty plain language.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, just that it exists and Schrodinger frequently misunderstands how it works.
If you insist on misunderstanding this, too, then there's nothing else I can say.
You are the only one misunderstanding here. See AngelHedgie's post above if you want another rephrasing of the same point.
We know it's something the US Constitution says. That's why it's an argument about what the law says, which isn't relevant to the argument actually being made (except, perhaps, in that the law says something stupid and limited)
This doesn't seem like something you can actually avoid. This data is essential.
35,000 data points over 6 months = 200 data points per day.
If the guy is a busy professional/politician, then it's perfectly feasible to be using your phone 200 times per day.
The question is, how many data points would you expect from live 24/7 non-stop tracking?
The point is that it's a shortsighted view, especially in light of the power that non-state actors can wield. A person afraid of retribution from their employer for speaking out is just as repressed as the person afraid of retribution from the state. Even worse, it is possible for the state to "launder" itself through non-state actors, getting around the safeguards of power.
Which is kind of interesting in this very context. The government doesn't need to read every email you've ever written. Google already does it for them.