kondrak writes:
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| Tapping Every Phone Call in the Country -- Redux
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http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000315.html
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| Greetings. Now it becomes crystal clear why the phone companies
| have been begging to be indemnified for past participation in
| illegal wiretapping and subscriber transactional data disclosures --
| it's obviously been going on massively for years -- as many of us
| have long suspected.
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| Today's Washington Post explores Verizon's admission that they've
| been handing over customer calling data without court orders for
| ages (
http://tinyurl.com/2brmh2 ).
|
The thing to remember is that, per the law and the courts,
calling records are the property of the phone company -- they
are not yours and you have no statutory right to them, at least
in the U.S. There is no unitary "right to privacy" but rather a
patois of specific privacy-like rights. For example, by law
what you watch on cable television is protected, i.e., what you
watch cannot be be kept as a record. However, what you download
is not specifically called out as protected and thus what you
download is not information about you that you control. Rather,
it is operational data that is the property of the upstream
provider, and capital-intensive industrial concerns are far,
far easier for a government to push around than is some small
nothing.
Wishful thinking about this is at once useless and vapid. A
Constitutional Amendment is perhaps the only genuine answer,
unless you like the continuing jingoism of this or that judge
inventing a right that the Congress has never had the moral
fortitude to enshrine in law.
No, I don't like it.
--dan
Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:17 CST