Is there a legitimate argument that once you call on an open airway or write on a public forum

[bluedeathray]

That the information in that communication is no longer private property?

Don't get me wrong, I abhor what the government is doing in the name of "protection". And see room for miles of abuse.

[snot]

1. I think yes, if you speak in public, you can't complain if anyone notices.

Part of the problem, in my view, is the definition of what's public and where a reasonable expectation of privacy falls.

I personally feel that phone calls, emails, texts, and the like should be treated like hard copy letters. We write or speak them for particular individuals, not the public at large, or the government, or corporations.

On the other hand, letters to the editor, or comments on posts on online publications, are presumably intended for the public at large, and I have no problem with their being treated that way.

[Revanchist]

3. I agree

You write or send something to a specific person (text, E-mail, etc.) then you are expecting it to go only that person, not the general public. If the other person releases/discloses what you've sent, that's another story.

[snot]

5. Yes; release by the addressee is an assumed risk--

but just because you're willing to take the chance that the person you addressed it to might publish should NOT be taken to mean that you're ok with it if the carrier of the message publishes it to others.

[loyalsister]

2. Considering the fact that the hearer can repeat it.....

It's difficult to argue against it.

[JustinL]

6. that was a 5-3 ruling made after Nixon and Ford had shifted the court dramatically to the right

I prefer the reasoning of Thurgood Marshall's dissenting opinion:

But even assuming, as I do not, that individuals "typically know" that a phone company monitors calls for internal reasons, ante at 442 U. S. 743, it does not follow that they expect this information to be made available to the public in general or the government in particular. Privacy is not a discrete commodity, possessed absolutely or not at all. Those who disclose certain facts to a bank or phone company for a limited business purpose need not assume that this information will be released to other persons for other purposes. See California Bankers Assn. v. Shultz, supra at 416 U. S. 95-96 (MARSHALL, J., dissenting).

The crux of the Court's holding, however, is that whatever expectation of privacy petitioner may in fact have entertained regarding his calls, it is not one "society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.'" Ante at 442 U. S. 743. In so ruling, the Court determines that individuals who convey information to third parties have "assumed the risk" of disclosure to the government. Ante at 442 U. S. 744, 442 U. S. 745. This analysis is misconceived in two critical respects.

Implicit in the concept of assumption of risk is some notion of choice. At least in the third-party consensual surveillance cases, which first incorporated risk analysis into Fourth Amendment doctrine, the defendant presumably had exercised some discretion in deciding who should enjoy his confidential communications. See, e.g., Lopez v. United States, 373 U. S. 427, 373 U. S. 439 (1963); Hoffa v. United States, 385 U. S. 293, 385 U. S. 302-303 (1966); United States v. White, supra at 401 U. S. 751-752 (plurality opinion). By contrast here, unless a person is prepared to forgo use of what for many has become a personal or professional necessity, he cannot help but accept the risk of surveillance. Cf. Lopez v. United States, supra at 373 U. S. 465-466 (BRENNAN, J., dissenting). It is idle to speak of "assuming" risks in contexts where, as a practical matter, individuals have no realistic alternative.

If Humphey had won the 1968 election, Marshall would almost certainly have been in the majority.

[JustinL]

15. same could be said about Citizens United and Plessy v Ferguson n/t

[sibelian]

7. The Internet is no different from writing on a wall in the street.

I've never understood why anyone thinks otherwise.

[bluedeathray]

8. You see no difference between e mail & Facebook?

At least in terms of government intrusion?

[WinkyDink]

12. Really? You think, then, that the govt will agree---AND REVEAL ITS OWN USE OF THE INTERNET? Or

does your assertion apply only to the citizenry?

[HereSince1628]

14. I've never understood why messages in private media are considered public graffiti

All that makes digital communication as public as graffiti is the capacity to intercept it.

Why is a data signal along a privately owned wire/optical fiber or privately generated radio-wave considered information within a public conveyance? It's not like the message is spilling out of a pipe onto public space and being collected in a bucket (although I understand the US actually has intercepted microwave communication in this fashion).

The reason for such consideration seems to be that we are educated to believe that. Its origins seems to emerge from justice system and security agencies' desires for us to believe just that. And the motivation for them to get us educated is that the information once treated as being the public domain can be conveniently intercepted and converted/decoded to a form available and useful to government. So they spin together a rationale, a court buys in, and we adopt the rationale.

What seems to contain some truth is that privacy of communication is quite a maleable thing and that privacy is inversely correlated to the capacity of government (and others) to snoop.

As soon as technology for snooping is developed those agencies who desire to use it pressure the justice system and society to accept it as "just monitoring what is available in the public domain".

We are rather naïve to think we have un-erodible constitutionally protected privacy rights to the contents of an information packet.
What actually protects the content of our communications are the limits set by technology and the cost of implementing that technology.

The snoopers wish us to go about our lives believing in that false sense of privacy, they wish us to reveal much as we exercise our 'freedom'. The serious 'damages' done to the 'security' system by people who remind us our sense of privacy is false (like Snowden) stem from changes in behavior in targets and potential surveillance targets.

Isn't it peculiar that, simply stated, that damage is the confounding of the snooping and the restoration of privacy in communication?

[randome]

16. Well thought out.

But I question whether 'snooping' can apply to data that is copied and never looked at unless a legal warrant gives that authority.

'Snooping' means 'looking at' to most people. If the data is not being looked at, just stored, is that snooping?

The vast majority of our email is backed up on servers. GMail. Outlook. Hotmail. Is it snooping if no one looks at it?

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[HereSince1628]

17. I would caution Americans who lack experience with electronic surveillance that knowledge of content

really isn't required to identify 'bad guys'.

While my experience working in a military liason to the NSA is decades out of date, and I am in no position to guess what the US would actually do with information about identified very bad guys--I have no doubt that significant responses ARE available.

I also know that during Vietnam such responses might only be based on the equivalent of metadata that identified a node in a communications network.

[Laelth]

10. The test, generally speaking, is "reasonable expectation of privacy."

When the question is, "Did the government do something or pass a law that violated a person's reasonable expectation of privacy?" If so, it's unconstitutional. If not, it's constitutional. We inherited from the English common law the notion that letters sent through the Royal Mail are protected and private. We continue to believe that letters we send through the USPS will be private. We logically attach the same expectation of privacy to e-mail (probably because the word "mail" features prominently in the word "e-mail."

Letters are never private to their recipients. We know and expect this, but we expect the entity that delivers the mail (our e-mail clients and SMTP clients run by our ISPs) to respect and protect our privacy. This all follows naturally from the principles we inherited in the English common law.

Actual case law and legislated law on this subject, however, is different. Some of it abrogates (i.e. conflicts with and supersedes) the common law. When it does, a constitutional question arises, and when the Courts look at these questions, they ask, as I said above, "Did the government do something or pass a law that violated a person's reasonable expectation of privacy?"

There is no firm answer that covers all aspects of the privacy question, but "reasonable expectation of privacy" is the teat.

Hope that helps.

-Laelth

[Jamastiene]

11. Public is public.

Private is private. So, if you post something in public, yes, it is public, not private.

[Recursion]

13. Per SCOTUS, you can't expect privacy in whom you call, because you told the phone company

So there is precedent for that idea.