Does the fourth amendment really guarantee us the right to pass any information through any medium, and assume that it is still considered private?
The problem is that privacy and freedom (I believe) are mutually exclusive. If we are granted total privacy in our communications systems, then that must, by definition, infringe on the freedoms of whoever owns the mediums. The argument goes back even farther to the ideas of intellectual property. Does your data transmission really belong to you? If someone copies it, do all the copies still belong to you? The way I see it, there are two things, stuff, and ideas. I believe that the fourth amendment protects all of my stuff, but not my ideas. In fact, I believe that the first amendment ensures my right to duplicate and retransmit ideas. If I send data to my local router, then whoever owns that router now has total access to my data. Expecting anything else is just naive. If I encrypt the data with my friends public key, however, the person who owns that router only has access to an encrypted block of data, which is largely (but still finitely) safe. I feel that any given three letter agency has the right to record whatever they see come in through their lines, even if transmission to them was not intentional. Notice that we also have the right to listen to open conversations, and to sniff on open networks, and even keep databases of what we learn, so why should we deny a government agency the same right? - DEAN _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/