Computers, Privacy & the Constitution

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EdwardBontkowskiFirstPaper 9 - 02 Nov 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
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 Thank you very much for you comments. I am going to respond to them here if you will allow for it.
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I entirely agree that there are far superior methods to ensure safety of stored email. After taking both your Law and the Internet Society class and this class, I am now familiar with the types of devices you have suggested people use (such as the one you described) in order to ensure their privacy. I agree that such devices would be superior methods to ensure privacy. However, I was trying address the most generally cognizable situation (and it is a sad situation) that most users of the internet currently find themselves in and analyze the law within that context. As much as I'd like to believe that society at large would adopt such devices as you have suggested en masse, I don't believe such a thing would occur in the near future. Given this, I've tried to point out what I believe are the shortcomings in the SCA given what I feel is the most realistic trajectory of the internet within the next 5 years.
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I entirely agree that there are far superior methods to ensure safety of stored email. After taking both your Law and the Internet Society class and this class, I am now familiar with the types of devices you have suggested people use (such as the one you described) in order to ensure their privacy. I agree that such devices would be superior methods to ensure privacy. However, I was trying address the most generally cognizable situation (and it is a sad situation) that most users of the internet currently find themselves in and analyze the law within that context. As much as I'd like to believe that society at large would adopt such devices as you have suggested en masse, I don't believe such a thing would occur in the near future. Given this, I've tried to point out what I believe are the shoratcomings in the SCA given what I feel is the most realistic trajectory of the internet within the next 5 years.
 I will concede that resting my assertion on the simply analogy to the telephone was a bit simplistic, but due to word constraints I tried to give as fundamental an analogy as possible. There are many more nuances to the assertion, which I regrettably had to leave out.

-- EdwardBontkowski - 12 Oct 2010

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Edward, that's not a response to my comments: that's a defense. To say that you had stronger arguments but left them out due to space constraints is not a way of improving your paper; it's just an effort to deflect criticism using weak exculpatory rhetoric. Nor have you responded to the point I consider to be most important: the statute you discuss is meant to exceed the levels of Fourth Amendment protection available when communications are stored by a third party. Relegating the people to Fourth Amendment protection deprives them rather than expanding their sphere of rights.

Your comment about private mail servers is not to the purpose either. Obviously one can usefully judge the plausibility of a technical expansion of peoples' rights, but in order to make a judgment such as the one you express above (which comes to "your technical solution is impracticable or unlikely, so I'm going to discuss a legal solution"), you have to judge the practicability and political likelihood of the legal fix, and compare the two. I'm not an idiot, and if I thought the technical solutions available for increasing peoples' freedom in this area were less accessible, as practicable social change starting from where we really are now, I wouldn't recommend them. There are many sound reasons for disagreeing with my conclusions, of course, but you have to encounter the issues, not assume them away.

I do think you can make this essay much stronger. But the way we make writing stronger isn't by successfully litigating against the editor.

 
 
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Revision 9r9 - 02 Nov 2010 - 16:02:47 - EbenMoglen
Revision 8r8 - 12 Oct 2010 - 22:18:58 - EdwardBontkowski
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