tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post1568547971773280138..comments2024-03-28T11:33:16.271-05:00Comments on Adventus: Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-33596540530635417722013-08-28T11:43:04.258-05:002013-08-28T11:43:04.258-05:00Well, within the limited context of treating 18 ye...Well, within the limited context of treating 18 year old students as adults. It's an interesting dynamic when I get a "dual credit" student whose parents want to discuss their student's progress with me, or get their grades, and I can't give them as a matter of law. I'm charged with protecting the student's privacy, as the student is an adult by the time they (usually) reach college, not a minor.<br /><br />Which is why the envelope presumption exists: to protect me as much as anything else. E-mail can both be read by anyone who can access your inbox, but it can also be easily sent to everyone else with the push of a button. As I think I said in the post (I've said it before), I've received many a personal e-mail (or about something I have no interest in) sent as a "reply all" when "reply" was more appropriate.<br /><br />You don't really get that with a written letter, even in days of desktop copy machines. Custom created by use is part of the determination of how much privacy you can reasonably expect in the form of communication.Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-15162776420510372412013-08-28T10:43:15.117-05:002013-08-28T10:43:15.117-05:00Hmmm. Family, with shared computers and e mail ac...Hmmm. Family, with shared computers and e mail accounts, isn't quite what I thought you were talking about. <br /><br /> I would be rather surprised to see statistics or a study that says, outside a family or committed relationship, very many people would feel opening and reading someone else's e mail was any more acceptable than opening and reading their snail mail. I've borrowed/played around with different computers and it never occurred to me to even *try* getting into their owners' e mail programs. <br /><br />But if I'm the outlier, and most everybody else feels an unattended computer is fair game to read whatever they find, I don't think the relative security of a sealed envelope is long for this world. Progress is more of a shuffle, seems to me, than leaps and bounds or even steps - something worthwhile is always lostjim, some guy in iowahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16737929189283553013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-66168730295994677652013-08-28T07:32:29.347-05:002013-08-28T07:32:29.347-05:00Why does the tradition that I don't open your ...<i>Why does the tradition that I don't open your snail mail not apply to your e mail? It seems to me the only difference is it will be a lot more difficult for me to read your letters undetected.</i><br /><br />Because it hasn't been established, for one thing. Because there is a distinct difference between opening an e-mail and opening an envelope, for another.<br /><br />Leave your e-mail program open, anyone can read it. Use a common e-mail program (as my wife and I do), and anyone using that address can expect anyone else with the password to read what comes in.<br /><br />I don't open mail addressed to my daughter. I do open e-mails if she uses my e-mail address. Only then do I find out they are addressing her, not me.<br /><br />Too late then.Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-82180639248821631722013-08-28T07:20:40.469-05:002013-08-28T07:20:40.469-05:00Why does the tradition that I don't open your ...Why does the tradition that I don't open your snail mail not apply to your e mail? It seems to me the only difference is it will be a lot more difficult for me to read your letters undetected.jim, some guy in iowahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16737929189283553013noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-6933517287667884752013-08-27T15:43:53.522-05:002013-08-27T15:43:53.522-05:00Let me see if I can fit this into two comments, be...Let me see if I can fit this into two comments, because I'm sure I'll make just one, explode.<br /><br />I've been told by my superiors never to put private info, like grades, into an e-mail to a student. The presumption is anyone can open that e-mail and read it, so it isn't "private." True, anyone at home could open a letter addressed to the student, but the presumption they won't protects me from being charged with violating that student's privacy when I use snail mail instead of e-mail.<br /><br />We need these distinctions in order to function. Tradition says the addressee opens the envelope; technology means anyone with access to the account (or the refresh, if the program is running) can see the e-mails. Ergo....<br /><br />We clearly need some expectation of privacy, but we can't expand it to apply to all and everything. Metadata, for example, the stuff generated when you make a land-line call, has been around for decades, and AT&T has always had it. Since 1979, the Supreme Court has said that's fair game for a criminal investigation, and no one has much noticed.<br /><br />There is also the issue of how this information is used, how it is "looked into." But I have a post coming up on that, later. And, again, if the government decided to track your movements, to record where you went, what you did, who you talked to, for how long, and when you went home; they could do it. Outside your front door, your actions are public and not protected by a reasonable expectation of privacy. There's a great deal of our electronic communication that would probably fit the same reasoning.<br /><br />As for this:<br /><br /><i>Suddenly all of the massive databases Snowden, et al, allege the government has begin to seem like C+ undergraduate papers trying to make up for a lack of thesis statement and analysis by sheer verbiage and verbatim quotes from wikipedia.</i><br /><br />I completely agree. From what I understand, all the NSA can do anyway is establish patterns based on some known information (a telephone number known to be "dirty") to unknown information (who calls/is called by that number?). Even that level of data is imprecise. Snowden and Greenwald claim the level is so precise they can find your cell phone and turn it on anywhere in the world, and listen to what the cell phone can "hear."<br /><br />Which is insane, IMHO. It's a paranoid's fantasy. OTOH, the idea all this metadata will pile up and yield the needle of gold in the haystack is a bit fantastic, too, IMHO. As you say, if they can't dazzle us with brilliance, they all seem determined to baffle us with bullshit.<br /><br />At the end of the day, I'm still not convinced the NSA is worth paying for.Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-19571840848281745382013-08-27T15:14:03.293-05:002013-08-27T15:14:03.293-05:00You may say I'm stretching the meaning of the ...<i>You may say I'm stretching the meaning of the verb "to know" here, but what else can it mean?</i><br /><br />That's the key question here, ain't it? Computer memory and processing power is increasingly cheap. Automated pattern recognition and data-banking technologies are getting better and better. To say that it's inconceivable for the government to archive all electronic communications and be able to flag a small percentage as worth looking into is to invite Inigo Montoya's response to Vizzini about the use of that word: after all, Google does nearly this all the time as you point out. And since my electronic communications are, in many ways, my "effects", I would say I have a right to be secure from government intrusion into them and if SCOTUS nevertheless maintains the NSA's activities to be constitutional and hence legal, then it's time for Congress to change the laws.<br /><br />But, as you ask, do Google's computers have knowledge?<br /><br />To put this another way: why is the government so upset about leaks relating to NSA's activities. They claim that us knowing what the government can know harms national security, but does it? Perhaps too many people in positions of positions of power are too paranoid. Or perhaps the real issue is that, forgetting about the fevered dreams people have of what the NSA can do, the very fact that we have to resort to data-mining to find terrorists indicates how little we actually know? And revealing that the man behind the curtain is not an all powerful wizard reveals our weakness?<br /><br />After all, if we really could and did know every move of our enemies, wouldn't we want our enemies to know that "they can run but they can't hide"? So why the secrecy if the programs are legal (according to SCOTUS, et al, which get to define the law) and working? Unless maybe the real issue is not that the government <b>knows</b> so much about everyone and everything, but that we are really just using a lot of data to hide our lack of knowledge.<br /><br />Suddenly all of the massive databases Snowden, et al, allege the government has begin to seem like C+ undergraduate papers trying to make up for a lack of thesis statement and analysis by sheer verbiage and verbatim quotes from wikipedia.alberichhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03852752646926946626noreply@blogger.com