DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats

Re:DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats by pyre on Wednesday May 08, 2013 @05:54PM (#5677203)

  | But you're not hiding anything. You're
  | transmitting it in clear text through
  | Google/Facebook's services. You're not worried
  | about the right to hide your information, you're
  | worried about the right to hide it against the
  | government specifically.

That's not true. If I send a person-to-person message that goes through Facebook or Google, am I ok with that information broadcast across the globe to everyone? Probably not.

  | If I choose to share something with Google, I'm
  | okay with the government having access to it too.

Are you ok with the government having unfettered, unrestricted access with little or no oversight? That doesn't make any sense to me. Even if you don't care about the information that Google/Facebook have on you, do you really want government agencies to get used to accessing information without a warrant? It only incentives them to push for more access to information without a warrant.

  | Maybe the difference between us is that you
  | implicitly trust the employees of Facebook not
  | to do stuff like this, and don't trust government
  | employees, while I feel the opposite way.

Facebook is more accountable that the government is. To be fair, there are bad actors in all places, but the FBI/US Attorney General has more incentive to pull people into court, and send them to jail than Facebook employees do[1]. FBI agents 'doing their job' is more of a risk than Facebook employees doing their job, because the FBI agents' jobs are about arresting people and charging them with crimes.

When was the last time that an FBI agent was fired for overstepping their authority? On the other hand, I feel more trust that Facebook/Google would fire an employee that overstepped their authority.

[1] And they are always testing the bounds of how they can apply the law. See the case of trying to charge the mother that drove her daughter's classmate to suicide, where they tried to charge her with 'hacking' because she violated the Terms of Service of MySpace.

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Re:DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats by rayiner on Wednesday May 08, 2013 @06:03PM (#5677252)

> Facebook is more accountable that the government is.

How do you figure that?

> To be fair, there are bad actors in all places, but the FBI/US Attorney General has more incentive to pull people into court, and send them to jail than Facebook employees do.

The difference is that only a small fraction of people do things that causes the federal government to become interested in putting them in jail. Most people do things that arise the interest of private industry. See, e.g., the credit ratings agency mafia. Those companies would have a field day if they had access to Facebook's information. See also, all the hiring managers that would have to have access to peoples' social networking information in order to blacklist them for jobs. Or insurance companies looking for any reason to drop people from healthcare plans, etc.

How much you worry about something is generally proportional to the product of how likely that something is to happen and how bad that thing would be if it did happen. It's exceedingly unlikely that you'll be at the receiving end of a federal prosecution, even if that would be a really bad thing. But having trouble with your credit, having trouble getting a job, being dropped from your health insurance--all of these things are much more likely, and they can be pretty bad in and of themselves. Yeah, sure, the government can bankrupt me defending a prosecution, but then again so can my HMO dropping me from my health plan if I get sick.

As I said, I imagine this is a matter of outlook. I don't see myself as a revolutionary who might get railroaded by the government for fighting for a just cause. I do see myself as a guy with a wife and a kid looking to buy a house some day, worrying about health care costs for my aging parents, etc. Given that, the ways private industry can screw me over are a lot more real to me.

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