>They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds,

That's a really charitable way of saying "handle petty stuff that the FBI can't justify spending resources on".

Every specialty police department exists for this reason and this reason only. Because the mission is often so petty they wouldn't get any resources if it was obvious that resource allocation to that task was resource allocation away from other policing.

When you have real problems the real police have no problems allocating resources and whipping up dedicated teams. When you feel like using state violence to harass drunken college kids you create a campus PD. When you feel like using state violence to kick the homeless out of the train station you create transit cops. Etc. etc. Even if you're an investigative agency you will have no problem getting the local cops to provide muscle if your needs are legitimate. "Look at us working with the <pick three letters>" is the kind of photo op local departments love, so long as it reflects well on them.

You can either have separate agencies or you can have a pile of specialized sub-agencies within some umbrella organization.....but working out how to align funding with who it's serving is going to be harder with the umbrella organization in many cases.

Specialization is a thing within policing as much as it is within the rest of life. It's not like the same person who knows how to investigate a murder scene is equally capable of investigating complicated financial crimes on Wall St.

----------

In terms of aligning incentives, there are various situations where there would otherwise there would be a mismatch of "who pays for this/who's responsibility this is" vs "who this is meant to serve".

On your examples:

Campus PD - College has equal/larger population than town. Town-college relations are often tense at best. Voters in town have no interest in spending their tax money on adequate policing for the college, college has no interest in donating a bunch of money to the PD to maybe get better services that they still have no say in. Students often heavily distrust the local PD and are unlikely to report crimes to them. It's still a problematic structure, but the premise that it would be better without is questionable.

Transit Cops - No individual town or city is going to patrol the system coherently otherwise, and areas which utilize the service less are unlikely to spend significant resources policing it. Services which cross state lines also have jurisdictional issues even with just using normal state-level police.

Funny thing is, it works in pretty much any other western country. Now speaking about Germany there's essentially two police arms. The state police and the federal police.

I don't see why every government department needs a police. Yes there are specific crimes that you might want to investigate, but you don't have to have police for that. Look for example to IRS they can have investigators, but they don't need police powers. If they need those they can go to the police.

It's not only that every government department has a police now, it's also that (nearly) every one of them has swat teams, I mean for heavens sake the department of forestry has a swat team!

I hear you, though, even in Germany there are other separate police forces under different ministries, like the Zoll (customs and immigration), the Feldjaeger (military police), and Justizvollzug (correctional officers and prisoner transport) - and each one of them has SWAT-like teams in addition to the forces of state and federal police.

There are also a lot of other public officers with limited police powers and different reporting, just like in the US - officers of the courts, public health inspectors, the Ordnungsamt (public order office), forest rangers, officers of the bureau of standards etc.

Until a few decades ago, it was even more splintered, and the border police and railway police were only integrated into the federal police in the 1990s if I am not mistaken...

Some cities like Frankfurt also started to rename the „Ordnungsamt“ to „Stadtpolizei“ (City Police). Also, we should not forget that we have quite some presence of US military police around US bases like Ramstein, Kaiserslautern and NATO Headquaters.

In the Netherlands, we have national police, local police, military police, railroad police, forest police, border police, and so on. They are all fairly independent of each other and have separate jurisdictions.

The Dutch railroad police (as well as the water, traffic, and aviation police) was sadly disbanded in 2013 [1]. In the same year, all 25 local police forces were disbanded and replaced by one national police force [2].

[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dienst_Spoorwegpolitie#Opgehev...

[2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politie_in_Nederland#Vorming_v...

In Sweden, there was until just recently, 21 regional indendepent police, plus a national investigative unit. (And the secret police and the military police.)

Now the 21 regional police have been merged into one national police.

I have a story that captures what you're saying fairly well.

About a decade ago I was living in a major southern US city in the more modestly priced part of an upscale area of town. I came back to the area from work fairly early in the afternoon, rounded the bend, and saw both sides of the street littered with unmarked police cars and vans, with many, many extremely large men in suits and sunglasses running around, directing the hapless local cops to do this and that. I'm talking the whole American militarized authority jamboree and then some: dogs, rifles, lights flashing, citizens being shooed away. A big SWAT-looking van poking out of a driveway. Maybe 3 dozen official looking people all told. US law enforcement is nothing if not histrionic and self-important in how it occupies physical space, but this presence was more than just the usual overreaction to a cat stuck in a tree. I remember thinking "uh-oh" and really meaning it.

Of course I couldn't get into my parking lot -- I lived across the street a few doors down, and the cops weren't letting anyone through -- so I parked nearby and walked back over and began to chat up some neighbors, exchanging speculation on what the hell it could be. Obviously they were FBI, we all agreed - that's the cyborg-looking guys in suits, surely all grown in the same vat near Quantico? And the crime? Terrorism was the consensus, though one guy was sure it was counterfeiting money. (I remember that because he insisted that he knew someone "who used to do that".) The vibe standing there was equal parts morbid curiousity and real nerves -- what if someone was making bombs in our quiet residential neighborhood?

After a while someone got up the nerve to ask one of the bewildered local cops what the heck was going on. "That's not the FBI," he says, "that's the US Postal Police." Apparently someone was "sending marijuana in the mail".

This effing country, right?

This. This right here. Every word.

I would even go so far as to say, there shouldn't be specific immigration cops, or alcohol, tobacco and firearms cops, since if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with. To allow cops to go snooping around by widening jurisdictional responsibility, it has a very "pre-crime" aspect to it, which is often subject to prejudice and bias.

> if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with

Maybe I'm missing your point, but isn't that exactly what the cops in question are supposedly doing? "Immigration cops" investigate illegal immigration. The ATF investigates the unlawful use or sale of firearms and drug trafficking. All of these things are crimes (regardless of whether they should be).

So how is there a "pre-crime" aspect to specialization among police when it comes to things that actually are crimes?

I guess I'm asking a question of crime priority, and whether some crimes are more likely to be punished because a disproportionate amount of policing is put in place towards that sort of crime.

If the same resources that were dedicated to the numerous policing agencies in the US were given to a smaller number of more generalized agencies, those agencies would be allowed to prioritize where their time and resources are best spent protecting the public.

I would rather the public collectively decide (assuming an effective representative government) how much we should prioritize X vs Y rather than just giving a giant pile of money and saying to the cops “do with this money whatever you think is best”.

These people have a monopoly on legally sanctioned violence. If you think there is any merit in anti-trust for businesses or that big tech should be broken up, I hope you’d think it even more strongly for policing.

We don’t have a perfectly functional representative process, but we sure do have a way to get influence over the system. Imagine how much resources could have been devoted to the war on drugs if the police could have stopped all other policing. That would be terrible IMO.

It would also be bad (though perhaps less so) if the Dept of Education had no resources to examine its operations for fraud and waste.

Agree. What is the point of all these laws on the books if they aren't enforced? That will just encourage people to break them when word gets out.

If the counterargument is that these "crimes" shouldn't actually be crimes, then the solution is to remove the laws, no?

But I suppose that whether removing the laws is feasible is another can of worms.

> those agencies would be allowed to prioritize where their time and resources are best spent protecting the public.

If you trust the police to decide how to distribute their resources, I have some pretty bad news for you.

They can also provide specialized knowledge. Ex. the DOE OIG is going to have nuclear scientists, the HHS OIG or TIGTA is going to have tons of forensic accountants, etc. In the case of Inspector Generals specifically, they also have the mission of investigating internal misconduct within the agency, and they have a relationship where they are independently authorized to act but under ideal circumstances work closely with agency heads to root out corruption and improve efficiency. A lot of what they do is accounting and effectiveness audits that do not fall under law enforcement.

As it was, so it is. The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll; from the wikipedia article "a general reluctance to share information; the FBI in particular was uninterested as no large sum of money was involved and no classified information host was accessed" Cliff of course gives a very entertaining description of getting investigators interest. Should be required reading for anyone doing/interested in security.

Indeed, and excellent book that should be required reading for any computer professional, even outside of security.

No relationship other than being impressed with the work.

https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espiona...

Makes a lot of sense to me that each department handles their own law enforcement, and can set the priorities they prefer.

One centralized Federal Police Department would be a single point of failure and bureaucratic nightmare.

Imagine if there were not State and local police departments. Just the FBI managing every shoplifting arrest in the country.

On the flip side, there are plenty of countries that do just have a national police force, or a handful of regional departments, and don't have tens of thousands of independent police forces like America does. They tend to do just fine.

Any with a population and land spread comparable to the US? I imagine that would make more sense in a small country with low diversity of terrain/population/etc.

Plus a national police force is basically illegal and unconstitutional in the US.

Gosh, who's going to notify the feds in Portland of this?

Lots of countries do just that though, without the crazy specific separation and specialisation that America does.

Which ones and how big are they?

Pretty much every western country. Sweden, France, Germany to give three examples.

There are only a handful of western countries that use this approach. As counterexamples, Switzerland, the UK, Spain, and many other countries tend to have local municipal police departments, and Germany has state/Bundesland-level police departments as well as the random auxiliary departments that a sibling comment mentioned.

France and Sweden are both far more centralized and less federalized. There's a reason more federal countries such as Switzerland or Germany have more decentralized policing. I think it would be beyond unacceptable to most Americans, myself included, for the US to have a single police department with its bureaucracy in Washington. If anything, I think far too power in the US is already centralized in DC which contributes to bad governance due to the vastly increased distance (in many senses) between politicians and their constituents.

I would be fine with 50+6 state/district/territorial police departments, which is sort of the Germany or Canada (with Ontario and Quebec) approach.

None of these have a police per government agency, that's what we are mainly talking about. That there are local police departments or state police departments is not the main issue I think.

Germany has a federal police force, mostly tasked with border protection and transport security, and 16 state-level police forces.

Funny to note that cops in Bavaria drove BMW's and the ones in Lower Saxony drove VW's.

Right, so countries the size of a single US state.

The US divides it's police by town, not by state.

And France and Germany are each twice as populous as the most populous US state.

So you're not really correct.

There's absolutely no reason why having a single bureaucracy wouldn't work well.

It actually seems like it would be much easier to have a single bureaucracy.

Also, counties often have their own sheriffs with a separate set of powers and responsibilities. Sometimes court systems have their own enforcement arms, separate from other agencies.

The US often seems to have more layers of administration and law-making than some other places. Making individual officers work through which set of powers and laws they're dealing with in a given moment seems like it might at times be a daunting prospect. You could in theory organize them into a single bureau, but I suspect you'd inevitably wind up with specialized sections to deal with the particular laws in given cities.

Sheriffs and State Troopers ???.

Russia

Wait till you hear about privately-owned company and railroad police departments...

Do these private police have more authority than the private security hired by other businesses?

Yes, although I don't know if all states have them. In NC they are called Company Police which are considered Special Police Officers commissioned by the Attorney General. It started in the 1800s with the textile mills and company towns. They may only exercise jurisdiction on their employers property, or they may be employees of a security company that is hired and granted jurisdiction by other businesses. Most companies that do it have both security (Private Protective Services) and police (Company Police) services available. The only authority they have outside real property owned by their employer/client is when in hot pursuit.

Private universities, same as public, may have Campus Police instead of Company Police, and those officers also have jurisdiction on public ways passing through the campus. In some cases they also have one mile extraterritorial jurisdiction; moreover, they can receive broader jurisdiction through agreements with the city/county law enforcement.

Railroad police are to be certified in their home state and have nationwide jurisdiction by federal law, on the property and rights-of-way of their employer as well as in connection with its services (conceivably quite a wide scope as railroads run right through virtually all major cities--the CPD "bait truck" incident that cause controversy a few years ago involved NSRR Police). With the exception of Amtrak, these are all private companies.

I'm not sure to what extend qualified immunity does or does not apply to them, however.

PA definitely has something like this too.. just like in NC, it originated from company towns, in their case mining.

Yes. They're actually police, with attendant legal status and powers.

> When you feel like using state violence to harass drunken college kids you create a campus PD.

Someone's never been mugged on campus before... Campus PD exist to give special protection to the children of wealthy upper-middle class families that thw surrounding community is usually deprived of.

> Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc.

Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.

There's a sense in which is predates the US! Throughline from NPR had an episode about it, referring to a book called 'How the Post Office Created America' [1]

[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/908836752/the-postal-service

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311582/how-the-post...

That's a fantastic trivia fact, I guess threats to the postal service are a very old problem so it makes sense.

It's hard to understate just how important the postal service was to the country: beyond driving so much commerce (and hence making mail deliveries a valuable target) it was used for all kinds of official documents and financial documents (money orders were introduced to reduce the risk further). Travel being expensive and hard, no alternatives like phone or email, etc. means that you send letters a LOT and things like postmarks or registered mail signatures have a substantial legal weight. Making a highly trusted service with special status to deter thieves available to everyone at a modest fee was a really smart move.

Not merely threats to the postal service itself, but threats via the postal service. I imagine the best to get away with (say) fraud has always been to avoid physical presence, i.e. using mail.

This is the territory where police departments and agencies get themselves into trouble - investigating crimes that aren't really their job to investigate. They technically have jurisdiction over a specific location or process, and that gives them an excuse.

The most obvious parallel is pretext stops - state cops, sometimes local, coming up with an excuse to pull someone over on a highway, in order to check them for warrants or in hopes of discovering contraband they have no reason to suspect exists.

A less obvious example is immigration enforcement fishing for excuses to deport someone.

> the best to get away with (say) fraud

And letter/package bombs

I'm sure that the recent shooting of their FedEx colleagues in Indianapolis is on the USPS's mind as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if UPS and DHL tries to monitor social media as well.

also, back then, the USPS did more than just deliver mail.

> Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.

The wikipedia page for USPIS claims that. But the wikipedia page of the US Marshalls claims that same honor. I wonder which is correct.

Supposedly USPIS goes back to 1737 (or 1772 if you don't want to count that), whereas USMS started in 1789? USPIS claims its "birth date" to be 1775, so I guess that's the latest. https://www.uspis.gov/about/history-of-uspis#1775

It is also the only agency named in the constitution. The others are all fluff. At least that’s what I was taught!

Interesting, are you sure about this? The only clause I find in the constitution mentions post offices and post roads (perhaps that's what you're thinking of?), but nothing about their security. To my knowledge federal agencies were only established by the Administrative Procedures Act after WWII (which is basically the "constitution" of federal agencies), but I'm not sure if there's other similar terminology that might be in the constitution. If someone has a link to the clause that would be interesting.

Yeah buddy. The security service is just like internal affairs for the USPS. It's actually pretty creepy inside the USPS they enter through different doors, they have catwalks with two-way mirrors, etc. The SSF and DCF or whatever they're called (been a while) are super creepy to observe. You are CONSTANTLY being watch when you work there, but unseen faces. There is a reason 'going postal' became a thing. Imagine that atmosphere!

Having worked there, you drown out the catwalks and just consider them like fancy camera monitoring. We never, ever saw law enforcement, so it was out of sight, out of mind.

Census is in the Constitution as well

Census as an activity is, though not a Census Department specifically. Though that may be a quibbling distinction.

Armed forces would be another Constitutionally mentioned function.

Pretty the sure the Census is mostly conducted by the USPS though.

Incorrect.

Department of Commerce.

Ah, good to know, and thank you. Albeit, logistically carried out in large part through the mail. Would it be safe to say that they are intertwined, and the Department of Commerce is another made up beaurocracy, and if nixed the USPS would conduct the census?

> I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.

This distinction is disappearing quickly in the current Internet, where conversations are increasingly company-mediated and facilitated. There's no such thing as a "private" conversation on Facebook or similar hosted platforms. You might address a message to your friend, but you are sending it to Facebook, and they ultimately get to decide how private it is. It's likely a single "is_private" bit in a database!

I'm more and more defaulting to a very strict rule: Never send anything to the Internet that I intend to be private. Whether it be a forum post, a message board, an E-mail, or a chat message. Keep my private pictures off of "secure, private" cloud storage. Don't do anything on a web site that I wouldn't want talked about in my local newspaper. Consider it all public knowledge because it's one leak or subpoena away from actually being public knowledge.

Yes, but I think OP is saying that the law should protect intent. Just like with the physical mail system. It is illegal to open a letter addressed to somebody else (though, warrants can override this). But I am fine with the principle.

On the other hand, if you stick a huge banner out the front of your house, that information is fair game. Just like posting on your Twitter profile or blog. The intent was never for it to be private.

Not a correction, but I'd like to add a small precision to that because I've seen the same argument used in other contexts.

For Twitter and Facebook I tend to agree, as there is an active intent (as you say) of publication. However, I've seen people reason in the same way with respect to licence plate or face recognition: "but the information is public".

The fact that technology now allows us to treat licenceplates or faces information globally, in very cheap way, means that a fundamental new capacity is created.

I agree, the impact of automated scale is definitely worth considering.

Unfortunately, with the Internet increasingly being used to conduct business, government, education, and even religious services, that option is rapidly becoming less tractable.

(I say that as one who shares the general sentiments.)

WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook) employs end-to-end encryption between individuals for its 1on1 and group conversations, and no one else in the world besides those parties (or possibly backup companies those parties decide to use) has access to the message contents that WhatsApp says are protected by E2EE. It uses the Signal Protocol.

Facebook has started efforts to roll out end-to-end encryption for its Messenger as well, using the same protocol as WhatsApp, which Signal blogged about: https://signal.org/blog/facebook-messenger/#:~:text=Facebook....

Posts and other content on your "wall" or "timeline" are intended to be relatively public, according to whatever privacy settings you have set up on your account, and won't be similarly encrypted; but the content will only be available to the people that you allow to see your account and post. That's more of a permission set described by a database like you describe. But you can share different posts with different groups of people you define; or participate in public or private/secret/invite only groups where content is only accessibly by those people.

Yes, that content would be accessible as plaintext by certain FB employees, just like your Gmail account's contents could be accessed by certain employees at Google. However, there are very strict policies around not accessing user content at FB by employees unless required for the function of the employee's job (e.g. investigating spamming, child pornography, and other abuse like that I would imagine; or assisting law enforcement with subpoenas or court orders for the content).

Notably WhatsApp has no ability to hand over message contents between individuals whose conversations are protected by end-to-end encryption even if it receives a court order to do so, because the encryption keys protecting that content truly live only on the user's devices, and the plaintext content never touches WhatsApp servers today. As long as you don't back up your message history outside your device in plaintext (and what WhatsApp stores on the device might be encrypted now too; I'm not sure), the only way for anyone to obtain the message history is to get their hands on your phone and the encryption keys & message history it contains. So if your phone is protected by a strong passcode and a security vendor hasn't found a way to bypass iPhone login security, as long as your iPhone is locked even the US government won't be able to get at your data.

I believe their was a court ruling that passwords to your phone are protected by the 5th Amendment against testifying against yourself, so I don't believe a court can compel you to reveal the phone password, but I'm not up to speed on the current case law. So if you lock your phone before an attacker seizes it, they can't get the contents even if the attacker is a government (unless they're willing to use physical coercion as in XKCD 538 [1], or indirect physical coercion such as ordering revelation of the password under threat of contempt of court, if that's permissible).

WhatsApp is also allowing businesses onto the platform, to use it to communicate with those customers, and some of those conversations may be regularly encrypted, not end-to-end encrypted. Those conversations are displayed differently in the UX of WhatsApp when the conversation begins, to clarify that they're not protected by E2EE. (It's arguably impractical to have real E2EE between a customer and a large business with, e.g., many customer service agents. What would that really mean? I personally think E2EE is most meaningful between individual people who personally know each other, not between people and businesses which are anonymously-defined, constantly-changing groups of people.)

I'm not a spokesperson for any company and these are my own opinions based on what I've read from public news sources.

[1] https://xkcd.com/538/

> I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.

You may have fewer concerns about public monitoring vs private spying, presumably because in the latter case privacy is being violated in a way that isn't the case for the former.

But both cases are nefarious, and you don't have to choose between them.

Both are examples of using public funds to abuse access to information from end users for political purposes.

Public vs Private:

Public: I can think of an example. If the USPS finds out that in a certain area of a certain city, there is a big chance to have riots "tomorrow after 10am" (protests because of X-Y-Z resason), they can alert their local teams to e.g. deliver the post at 7am instead of 11am. Yes, some operations would be impacted (e.g. noon delivery won't happen), but this will protect the staff, protect the items (letters, parcels), the vehicles, etc.

If they just hoard data to feed a bigger best (e.g. NSA) then, the data is still out there (my public blog, your public blog, HN comments, etc.) and they are up for the taking. In which case it doesn't matter if it is a federal agent carrying a NSA or a USPS badge.

I'd be surprised if they could deliver anything ahead of schedule, but I imagine they can tell people to stop what they're doing at 9am if they're in a dangerous area

14 billion dollars was spent in the 2020 election [1]. If someone wants to “nefarious”ly analyze public information for political purposes, they can easily do it with private funds.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/28/202...

>I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.

You should be worried about both, they're honestly equivalent.

See, this is the greatest bait and switch ever perpetrated on the citizens of the United States, and I'm not sure anyone was even actively trying to do it. Time was, communication between you and someone else was fundamentally expected to stay private. This was by definition prior to Third Party Doctrine, with which the Judiciary unilaterally decided the 4th Amendment was more of a suggestion than a hard line in the sand.

Communication intermediaried through a service provider should never have been severed from personal effects and papers. If third-party metadata were treated bbased on the end; intended communication either point to point (private), multicast (confidential with expectation of privacy), or broadcast (implicitly public), we'd be in a much better place. When the Government starts vendoring out surveillance, or bakes it into departments, you know you've steered your society off the rails somewhere.

The fact we're okay with businesses acting like a cabal of gossiping grannies only legitimizes the continued erosion of private space. How long until IoT connection strength logs make it possible to surveill anywhere with enough devices and computing power?

> So it’s not that surprising that these agencies will seem to stray out of their lanes.

Like the secret service (Treasury agents) becoming the President’s bodyguards?

USPIS is actually the oldest federal law enforcement service.

That said, its present utilisation seems to specifically address cases in which other agencies, both outward-facing (CIA, NSA) and inward (FBI) are limited.

The USPIS's investigation, case, and conviction rations are quite impressive. Relatively low counts of cases, I believe, but conviction rates are extraordinarly high (~90% or so).

Documented in the FY2019 USPIS annual report: https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FY-2019-ann...

And these are their stories. Dun dun.

You joke, but they actually made a TV series. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inspectors

> "...it was the only show on commercial television paid for by a U.S. government agency, with its funding coming from the United States Postal Service asset forfeiture..."

> If Postal is monitoring broadly for threats against their systems

If, however, they are running a wide-net surveillance program under the guise of "anybody could be threatening our systems at any time, so we better monitor everyone just in case", thats a bit different sound. It's easy to say "well, we have to protect our systems" but so far there's zero evidence anything that USPS has been monitoring was threatening their system, and yet they keep the surveillance. With zero oversight or control from the people.

It does seem like they should centralize this stuff though... virtually every nationwide-jurisdiction agency will want to monitor social media posts so you would think they would centralize it in one department rather than duplicating effort. Also the argument can be made that spending too much time enforcing other agencies' laws is not spending the budget the way Congress intended.

Well... when you're posting things on social media you're publishing them to the world. That somebody is going to look at them... well I guess I don't have that much of a problem with it. If you don't want the minor details of your life recorded and put up to government scrutiny, stop making your existence a reality show.

I basically agree with "...fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. "

a few caveats though

Scraping public data to see if some person / group / whatever is doing something the week of 4-20 is one thing, it's another to scrape the data and hold it for years or forever.

How long should something be held on to after a poster has deleted it?

I think transparency about data retention is very important - as this data can also become a tool used by others outside the scope of the original intention / need.

What is private and what is thought to be private by the majority of Americans today?

Most on HN may see differently and have a better understanding - but aside from the obvious "it's in the cloud is not your data, your data is their product to sell.. only self hosted, encrypted, one-time pad notes shared in person with no electronics around to listen in on is private" - sure..

But even beyond what many around this forum may think is common sense - I can think of many things where lines are blurred not just by ignorance but by design, and lack of awareness -

a fbook pm / chat - is that private? what if I have posts set to friends only - and someone uses a cambridge alanytica type thing where friends who do something exposes what I thought of as private to third party scrapers? Is that scraping illegal if scraping public posts is? What about browser extensions?

My private friends only photos - are they being used to train AI for fbook, clearview? are they being shared by some poll software a friend is using?

an invite only group, is that data private? does text in a description create a type of protection? What about data that is hacked and published - it's become public data - how about an ex lover who publishes what was thought to be private DMs?

I'm sure there are many more situations in which people think they are doing things privately that others could finger a reason why it's not.

stories? disappearing snaps?

If fbook keeps a log of things you've typed but then backspaced over - is that data public? is it yours? How many people think that data even exists?

So in general I kind of agree - but I think we should include things people assume are private as off limits without warrants, while specifying what data is probed, what the retention is, and what the scope of sharing could be.

The IRS has a sizeable police force as well.

If they're disinterested in private comms, it's because they're very interested in public comms. If they're wondering what the public thinks and would make improvements, great, but if they're targeting the public because what they say is too true to handle, ugh.