General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If you're OK with revelations of NSA snooping, you're part of the problem [View all]cascadiance
(19,537 posts)... to protecting us in cyberspace, and that unlike our private property where there is a physical space owned/controlled by us that circles the private space of our houses, etc., the government chooses to believe there is nothing that protects them or corporations from claiming the rights to spy on your private information stored on other people's computers.
Ask yourself why employers are forcing applicants to turn over facebook passwords to get hired. This has been fought back at the state level. I've been helping our state get legislation passed here to fight this.
Ask yourself why the IRS claims the right to look at all of your email on servers after it has been there for an arbitrary period of time or if it has been read.
Ask yourself why online backup firms like Carbonite are heavily advertising on both the left and right side of the aisle on talk radio outlets, and that they have a copy of your personal computer contents online where it is "no longer protected" by the physical boundaries of your home like it would be if you backed up your computer instead to a secondary disk in your house.
We need to pressure the congress, the president, and the courts to define yes or no whether the fourth amendment protects our privacy in virtual spaces, and if not, then push for a constitutional amendment for something that does and get a tech task force to define practical boundaries so that it can provide a good set of ground rules that allows for technical progress in the future, but sets rules so that our privacy doesn't get abused in that space. The spirit of the 4th amendment needs to be made law today to protect us the way our forefathers would have wanted, and shouldn't be ignored due to "technicalities" the way that so many powermongers in our elites want to today.
This should be possible, as there are situations where the PTB want others owning a piece of information being stored on computers by others when it suits them. An example of this is copyright and patent law, where they go after people that "pirate" copies of music, video, and computer software, mostly because powerful interests own these properties and want their ownership protected, even if they are sitting on someone else's computers. It would seem that if they own information on others' computers, etc. that allows them to take action on how people use that info, that we as individuals should be able to make the same claims of private information stored on others' computers as well that we should be allowed to "own" in the same way.
It is the fourth amendment protections or lack thereof that is the core of all of these different online privacy abuses that needs to be fixed to tackle them more constructively rather than trying to go out and taking on each issues separately and losing each time to the PTB.