Obama Admin "No right to privacy"Follow

Dear Uncle Smash

Please tell me about Cookies.

/sits cross-legged and waits

No, I'm suggesting that the whole set of complaints that you and everyone else in this thread is having are stupid, and there is no actual Fourth Amendment violation going on at all.

But you keep assuming, for whatever reason, that my political standpoint is almost exactly the opposite of what it actually is...

A host of previous SCOTUS rulings would tend to disagree with you.

The protection against unreasonable searches of one's person and effects has historically included not allowing the government to put a tracking device on someone (or say, in their cell phone) without a warrant, which is effectively what a cell phone becomes in this situation (to varying degrees depending on which sort of search we're talking about of course).

And while one can argue that a person chooses to carry a cell phone and/or chooses to make a call using one, the SCOTUS usually frowns on what is essentially a shrinkwrap agreement requiring everyone to give away their rights upon purchase and use of a product (like a cell phone). The question isn't whether there is an infringement (there is), but where the SCOTUS is going to decide to draw the line in terms of when a warrant is required. That line is likely to lie somewhere between obtaining basic call usage data and actively tracking where everyone carrying a cell phone is at any given time.




I don't know what other assumptions were made about any of your posts, but my issue is that you are making statements which are factually incorrect and which lead one to assume you do hold a position in opposition to the principle of privacy protection. It's all well and good for someone to insist that they believe in and support privacy rights, but when that same person insists that governments tracking people by homing in on their cell phones without using a warrant isn't a violation of those rights, it calls to question either their honestly or their understanding of the issue as a whole.

It's kinda like someone insisting that they are opposed to stealing, but then arguing that shoplifting isn't really stealing...

Edited, Feb 12th 2010 8:43pm by gbaji

Eh, I'll just say that my standpoint on privacy rights is that unless you're actively defending your privacy, you don't really have room to talk about them. In other words: stick to cash only when possible, minimal government records of yourself, and so on.

There's not really a reasonable middle ground between strong privacy rights and "all information about you is available to the government as needed", folks. Quit trying to pretend there is.

For the vast majority of people, it doesn't, exactly through that line of reasoning.

More to the point, for the vast majority of people (in this case, smaller values of "vast" than in the previous sentence), they don't care that that's the case.

Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with your brain.

I mean this sincerely. It's not that you're stupid, exactly, just that you seem to operate on some alien plane of logic where the things you say make sense. This is far from the most egregious example, though it's hard to say which is the absolute worst. Maybe your posts in this thread, or the whole "you can't support the death penalty and abortion" thing.