> From: Derek Balling [mailto:[email protected]] > > On Jun 11, 2013, at 9:46 PM, "Edward Ned Harvey (lopser)" > <[email protected]> wrote: > > You think Facebook employees don't have that? You think it's clear, even > within an organization the size of Facebook, which individual human beings > know some credentials to get in with sufficient privileges as to see your > message? > > CAN they? Sure. Are they legally allowed to? ECPA would seem to say "no", > that I do have an expectation of privacy.
If anybody has any expectation of privacy with their communications on Facebook etc, they only expect privacy from the "good guys" because it's acknowledged the bad guys won't respect or obey the law. That's just one law, that conflicts with some other law. The great thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from. You can quote scripture to support whatever you happen to believe, including war and murder. And if you look around, you can find all sorts of legal contradictions and loopholes. Nevermind moral and ethical conflicts. Nevermind undisputable infractions of the law. Nevermind decisions made by one court, only to be overturned by another court. Claiming ECPA protects your privacy is a very weak argument. Everyone knows, an unspecified and unknown number of employees and partners have access to said communications. Most people don't have any presumption of understanding privacy laws, nevermind believe confidently that their understanding of the law is infallible. Everyone knows the law is mutable, and subject to interpretation, and THAT is only relevant if they thought they understood it in the first place. If a vague "whole bunch of unknown people" (employees, partners, or whoever has been granted authorization) are acknowledged to have access, and the only reason to believe they won't access said communications is "they shouldn't"... Then expanding that unspecified group to include the NSA or CIA is a pointless distinction. If you're an employee of the NSA or CIA, and you need to research something, then you go get hired at Facebook into a position where you would have access, and voila. Now you're an employee. Granted access. AKA, you've infiltrated Facebook, and guess what, now you get paid double. (Or, just influence some law makers to pass some laws quietly, so you can quietly coerce them to grant you access, or just promise them you're the good guys working in the name of national security, and get them to voluntarily make you a partner or something, and grant you access...) There are a zillion ways, and it's very easy, to infiltrate Facebook. The same is true the other way around. I've seen conspiracy theory saying things like the FBI is responsible for 9/11. Well, if there's any truth in that all, it only means some people with malicious intent managed to get themselves hired at the FBI and then misuse their power. It doesn't mean the FBI as a whole is bad, etc. Every organization can be infiltrated, and even priests and presidents and judges sometimes do things that are wrong. But most of that is pointless and can be boiled down to a few simple facts: Some people choose to knowingly break the law. Others have many conflicting interpretations of the law. The law is mutable, and enforcement is variable. An extremely small number of people presume to have any understanding of privacy law at all. For the rest of us, there is a very low expectation of achieving privacy, even when marking messages as "private" sent via services such as facebook. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
