Kidnap of the Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment is dying and we’re all the murderers, according to 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals Chief Justice Alex Kozinski and his law clerk Stephanie Grace. In an article for TheDaily.com titled “Pulling Plug on Privacy; How Technology Helped Make Privacy Obsolete,” Kozinski and Grace eulogize the Fourth Amendment, recognizing the diminished expectation of privacy that every American has today.

With the increased use of smart phones that track our GPS location at every moment, police no longer need a warrant to track your everyday movements. In a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, individuals who communicate information to another person no longer have an expectation of privacy regarding that information (United States v. White, 1971). It is by this logic that government agencies are able to obtain information about your everyday movements without a warrant. The agencies argue that since you have sent that data via your smartphone to your cell phone provider, they do not need a warrant to obtain that information from your cell phone provider.

The problem with this logic is that most people reasonably believe that they are not subject to being tracked by the government simply because they own a smartphone.

FedEx Bombs = Pat Downs?

Maybe it's just me, but is our "security" sector is becoming more and more sexually deviant?

Following Sept 11th, one could make the arguement that more security was needed. So things like knives, box cutters, and scissors were banned from airplane. After the "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid, we could no longer carry a lighter onto a plane, though they graciously gave that back to us. These things, though intrusive, had at least some semblence of sanity when it came protecting our air travel.

Of course, once the government begins something like this, it's never satisfied, so when the "underwear-bomber" gave us a scare on Christmas we were told to lose what little was left in the way of privacy.

This is when the perversion really took off with the introduction of the fancy "full body x-ray" systems. Now men, women, and even children are having their naked bodies revealed and photographed by the TSA. Don't worry, though -- it's all in the name of security, right? Again, putting pedophiliac imaging to the side, logically it makes sense that if we see under your clothes, we can prevent this type bombing that other detectors seemed to miss. 

So when packages made with questionable materials show up in FedEx's airplanes, we would expect to see things like better screening of cargo, and purhaps bomb sniffing dogs at FedEx's terminals right? Wrong.

Welcome, Mark Zuckerberg, to the world you created . . . like it or not.

When recently asked about his company's privacy problems, Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook, stated "the age of privacy is over." Sadly for Mr.Zuckerberg, he didn't know how true that statement would turn out to be.

The well known Hollywood gossip website Gawker combined with another website known as Valleywag to start a new campaign to photograph the Facebook CEO everywhere and anywhere he goes and put it up on the web. Photos ranging from him at a park to sitting at home have all been put together and posted at Gawker in an attempt to destroy any privacy that Zuckerberg might have.

"Facebook's CEO doesn't seem too preoccupied about your privacy, or about ours," says Ryan Tate, editor of the gossip website Valleywag, which posted the photographs. "Likewise, we weren't bothered by the notion of tailing him around the Valley for a few days, or about sharing the experience with you...

"If it feels a little naughty to take such a close look into Zuckerberg's life, remember that this is the executive who pushed the private information of Facebook's hundreds of millions of users progressively further into the public sphere," Tate said.

Though I doubt much will actually change from this, I applaude these bloggers for standing up for the right of privacy, though -- ironically -- their careers are spent destroying it for the Hollywood elite.

Creepy Proposal from the Head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

The Head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a close confidant of Obama, proposed less than two years ago in an academic paper that the government pay covert agents and "independent" advocates to infiltrate groups which speak against the government and/or propose conspiracy theories.  The idea, Glenn Greenwald explains, is that "[t]his would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here. "  Though the administration has not yet moved toward accepting this proposal, it is certainly concerning given the fact that the paper was written recently and its writer is now in exactly the position he would need to execute the scheme.