It's not a completely ridiculous legal interpretation. The 4th amendment is implemented via the exclusionary rule, which excludes evidence from a court case obtained from an unreasonable search. As a matter of history and practice (the exclusionary rule predates the Constitution), the 4th amendment is in many ways a rule governing criminal procedure more than it is a privacy rule per se.

Now, today the prevailing view is that the 4th amendment is that illegal searches are unconstitutional even if the exclusionary rule can't be invoked (see, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named FBI Agents), but there is still this contour in the law that distinguishes collecting data from trying to bring it into evidence.

The argument here is probably wrong, but not ridiculous.

To be clear, I don't actually think it's worth trying to influence what is or isn't the legal interpretation that we might desire.

We can't blame power for establishing systems of control, just as we can't blame a tiger for mauling a zoo keeper: it's the nature of the thing. It's what we should expect, no matter how much time we spend coaxing or training it.

I'd much rather invest energy into developing solutions that allow us to communicate securely, rather than investing energy into asking those with power not to monitor our insecure communication.

But the thing is that this power of which you speak is supposed to be ours, per our form of government.

We are so far off the reservation that we have given up on trying to reclaim our government and instead, must now find ways to protect ourselves from our government.

That's a powerful statement about the plight of our nation.

Trouble is, the government represents 300 million people. You can't "reclaim your government" when the angered party consists of a couple thousand people.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the angered party", but my point was specifically that our government has been co-opted by interest groups that are not the people.

The fact that we have 300 million citizens and majority will cannot be expressed is exactly a symptom of this condition. The government is no longer the people, but a separate entity with its own agendas. Agendas which frequently run counter to the interests of the people.

The critical difference is one is a tiger with limited reasoning ability and the other is a human being. So, I can and should be pissed at people in power when they overstep their bounds.

And this being "pissed" achieves what exactly? Does your level of pissitude work as leverage to affect the reasoned-out behavior of these other human beings? If so, through what mechanism?

Being pissed leads to me donating money to the ACLU, voting, and voicing my opinions.

One of those might do something.

It's asinine to suggest that we remove vocal outrage from our political dialog. It is one of the finest tools of change. Just look at all the faux outrage over "high unemployment" under Bush 43 (average of around 5%), and compare it to the lack of outrage in today's economy. No, I think outrage is not something I'll give up to please supposedly enlightened people like yourself.

>The critical difference is one is a tiger with limited reasoning ability and the other is a human being.

No it's not, it's a system of human beings. Systems make "decisions" quite differently than individuals do. In some cases they have what we might consider far superior reasoning ability compared to the individual, but in others they're even more limited than the tiger.

> It's not a completely ridiculous legal interpretation.

Legal or otherwise, I'd rather not have money deducted from my paycheck and spent on data centers to store all of my phone calls and email.

Or if I have to pay for it, the NSA should at least be willing to send me a copy if I lose my own backups.

It is ridiculous because the 4th AM was used to legalize abortion. So in point of fact, there is nothing that is not ridiculous about the entire thing.

Liberal democracies don't particularly care about principles. I guess they are just a rhetorical device with which the masses beat the government upside the head. The government officials are numb to this.

If you'd like to see where your phone calls will likely be stored analyzed then check out the new NSA Data Center currently under construction in Utah. This thing is going to be huge! And I live just down the street...

http://binged.it/116pwHR (Yes, Bing has more recent arial shot of the construction)

Edit - Ha, I see someone else here mentioned this place already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656751

Re: Whisper Systems, do you have an iOS version available or in the works? The icons you used seem to imply it, but I see the source and all examples are for Android only. A quick search for "Whisper Systems iOS" (which was a suggested string) only turns up results about the Twitter acquisition.

Yes, iOS versions of both RedPhone and TextSecure are in the works. The former has been under development for a few months now, while the latter started as a project at the "Spring Break Of Code" event that we organized in Maui.