(If there is a lawyer in the house who could let us know otherwise, that would be awesome).
The Supreme Court, however, has been reticent to apply any interpretive oomph to the idea that electronic message sending represents the same type of "private correspondence" that a snail mail letter represents.
In fact, if anything it has generally leaned in the opposite direction. The SC has ruled that sharing personal or private information with a third party thereby nullifies your expectation of privacy and protection of your information by due process. This happened in the early days of telephony I think.
"But that is only from the Government's point of view!", I hear from the gallery...
Yes... Unfortunately it does set a societal precedent through the institution, however.
I mean, if as an arbitrary business, I can hand your information to the government and they can make use of it, then surely I am free to share data I have about you with other people\businesses?
Once that becomes legally acceptable, and people are willing to pay me for as much info as I can give, suddenly the economic incentive is to collect and sell as much information as possible. Note that this isn't a tech problem, but a social one.
As long as we don't take a stand by making law to cover the issues of electronic activity being considered "protected correspondence" with a reasonable expectation of privacy, we will continue to see these blatant invasions into our personal affairs by business and government alike.
The thing that will hold back that lawmaking though is that there are some VERY deep pockets that would see incredibly vast revenue streams dry up by passing something like that.
One could see places like Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, and the other Silicon Valley darlings doing everything in their power to convince both the government and the populace that doing something like that would be a terrible idea.
And they would be right to a degree. Many "free" services would have to switch to to a subscription model or something similar, and it could mean major cutbacks for many tech companies that haven't matured enough to diversify away from an ad supported business model.
I can't speak for anyone else, but to me, that is a small price to pay to establish a right to the privacy of the exercise of our wills in the electronic realm. Thinking in the Internet age is truly an inspiring thing to behold. However, the Net that enables this capacity for collective thought is just a tool. We will get out of the Net what we as people put into it. To me, the Net has always been about empowering and uplifting every person by putting the collective knowledge and wisdom of humanity at each person's fingertips before anything else. One should always come away from the Net having found something, but at the same time, one has the right to use the Net and not have anything TAKEN. A "Right to Lurk" as it were.
If I had to choose something as the basis for a new Constitutional Amendment, it would be something that would explicitly codify the expansion of the legal "expectation of privacy" to encompass all electronic forms of communication, commerce, and assembly; protecting the aforementioned from search and seizure by the government without due process. It wouldn't do anything for SciHub sadly, but it would be a step back in the right direction in terms of curbing some of the more demonstrably harmful ills the Net has facilitated in our society.
P.S. Sorry for the mind dump. It felt great. If you are still reading, you're awesome.
Where'd you get that from?
I think the Internet's original intent was to do it "because we can". Everything else came afterward.
That reasoning drove the majority of computer technology progress during the 1980s and 1990s. It wasn't until AFTER the birth of the World Wide Web did mainstream businesses start to really look at monetizing this new market, and in a symbiotic way hackers and nerds and geeks started crowing about altruistic philosophies like decentralization and how information "wants" to be free.
The open part can be pedantically removed in the case of ARPAnet, but I've not met anyone who confuses the Internet with ARPAnet. The Internet, as it came to be called in the 90's with the rise of the World Wide Web, WAS at it's core 'open'. Pretty much everyone I've met who was around and working on the ARPAnet saw it as a foregone conclusion it (a network based on the lessons learned through ARPAnet) would be going public in one way or another.
Now you have! :) Unless you don't count online interaction.
Why are you surprised that humans are being humans?
Why can't you put trust into the fact that there are more people being good most of the time.
Internet tools should be like paper and pencil, opinionless. Pencil maker doesn't get to control what gets written by the pencil, a social media platform maker doesn't get to control what gets said on the platform. Only when legally required, the pencil may be seized; only when legally required a social media post be taken down.
If with the protection and power of USA we can't stand by the Freedom of Expression in the marketplace of ideas, we are doomed to get an authoritarian overlords.
This "I don't like this free and open internet" because my ideas are losing is very dangerous power grab.
Usability became more important than flexibility. And intuitive operation prioritized over ease of learning.
There's a lot to be said for a harder to use computer with a learning curve, but which affords you more power to be a creator instead of a consumer at the end of the curve.
I'd go so far as to say that's better for us (as in, all humans).
Making computers accessible seems like a completely reasonable, sound priority. Yes, computer literacy is something we all need to work towards, but we'll never be in a world where the average person understands PKI, and saying that we should limit accessibility until they do is absurd.
Example:
Teaching fundamental abstractions before basing education on one set or another.
Teaching fundamental program sets/basics of toolchains (Think scripts, text editors, and intro to program compilation.)
Teaching fundamental protocols.
Teaching about infrastructure.
Teaching how to do X in Windows/Mac/Linux.
IN THAT ORDER. Notice that that curriculum, while it would likely have to choose one OS or another based on circumstances, focuses on what you can DO with a computer, and lays a foundation through which the neophyte user can begin to understand what a computer and the NET really are.
The NET isn't a pretty screen. It isn't one company's search engine, it's the means by which info goes from HERE to THERE. A computer isn't some mere calculator. It is an extension of our minds (and should be civically treated as such, but that's another post).
I can die happy if within my lifetime, my occupation in the tech industry becomes "unskilled" labor. For I will have contributed to finding a way to elevate mankind to a me level.
2000 years ago: "we'll never be in a world where the average person can read and write English"
I doubt this is even the point of GP.
My point is: it should be possible to use something without fully understanding the minutiae of how it works. We call this “user interface design”.
You should be allowed to live in a house without a full understanding of the architectural details that prevent it from falling down.
Why is this problematic? Why is more people having access to computing a bad thing? This is a dangerous, and (dare I say) elitist opinion. We're seeing positive impact, every day, thanks to the ubiquitously available computing resources.
If you'd like to use a computer with a learning curve, use a computer with a learning curve. Don't drag the whole world with you.
It might be a bit to deep an argument but where do you think intuition comes from? If we design peceaved reality after existing intuition you get a giant feedback loop that calls for ever more unrealistic representations.
Mabe an analogy can be had with electronics being mostly paralel processes while we can barely figure out how to implement it in higher languages. Our intuition likes the 1 thing at a time approach.
But then, of course, intuition is more useful for some people. For those people, no one is stopping you from digging into the engine itself. This is really the price discrimination idea applied to utility: offering a cheaper, easier to use interface (taking the bus) means now the bus is useful not only to the engineers, but the passengers as well.
The situation about computing is not really that much different. If you want to learn the internal of computers, Gentoo exists, feel free to use it. But should everyone use Gentoo? Not really. I'm probably more proficient in Linux than the average developer, but I don't see the need of using Gentoo myself either.
That is not to say we can't do better either. The signature design for SQLAlchemy is leaking abstractions (but in a good way). The average dashboard for a car today is way more complicated than the dashboard of a car 70 years ago. Yet, that's not stopping car ownership to grow. Maybe there's a lesson for us somewhere there as well.
In fact, it's my objection to computation illiteracy being acceptable in general amongst users. Devs and agencies cannot be trusted not to screw with things. If the average Joe cannot understand what is going on behind the curtains, they aren't free.
Freedom is a scary thing to many groups, and unfortunately, more and more we are seeing the pendulum swing further and further away from the Internet's original intent: to facilitate the fast and open communication of information. I want to say free and open, but unfortunately I have trouble being able to maintain that level of idealism anymore.