[lordofduct]

Privacy and property right laws.

We said this repeatedly.


As I said, they're monitoring my private communications over my private communication line. Which is a legal grey area. They aren't allowed to monitor my verbal commuinications over a telephone line, so why do they get to monitor my digital communications over the same line.

This is a grey area about where privacy law stands. Which means the law needs to be further interpreted. Which is what the government is supposed to do.

Quote

You guys complain when the government gets involved in something that is not its business, then complain again when it does not get involved in something that is not its business.

Who's "you guys"? Are you talking about me? Please cite these times I've done these supposedly contradictory things.

Nevermind that both aren't necessarily contradictory since I could be upset if the gov't gets involed where they don't belong, like gay marriage. And also be upset if they don't get involved where they do belong, like enforcing and protecting my constitutional rights.




You know what, nevermind, I don't need your answer, because you'll end up saying something about how you don't understand something we've already explained. Causing me to have to just repeat myself.

I get you don't agree... that's fine. You're not required to agree with me and are welcome to your own opinions.

But stop asking me to repeat myself.

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 28 February 2013 - 12:49 PM

[farrell2k]

lordofduct, on 28 February 2013 - 07:41 PM, said:

Privacy and property right laws.

OK. I won't ask you. I'll tell you. Logging your IP address from a P2P network where any expectation of privacy is impossible, and then sending it to your ISPs does not constitute a violation of your privacy. Property rights, yeah, I don't even want to know how you managed that stretch.

The day logging an IP address becomes a violation of privacy is a day the government truly oversteps its authority.

This post has been edited by farrell2k: 28 February 2013 - 01:00 PM

[h4nnib4l]

Why are they logging the IP addresses?

[jon.kiparsky]

I've been staying out of this argument, because there are no very convincing arguments to make, but this one

Quote

Logging your IP address from a P2P network where any expectation of privacy is impossible and sending it to your ISPs does not constitute a violation of your privacy.

is particularly unconvincing, since expectation of privacy and enforceable rights to privacy are quite different things.

I can have an expectation of privacy in many situations - in my house, in a secluded field in the country, in the dressing room in a department store, at my office, in my car. It might turn out that I am mistaken in my expectations, practically, legally, morally, or some combination of those, and it might turn out that my expectations are justifiable but not enforceable, or enforceable but not justifiable. Lots of complications can arise here. One important thing to note here is that the standard of "expectation of privacy" in US law is not limited to situations where someone has to go to any lengths to violate that privacy. For example, if the post office delivers my mail to a box by the road (the sort that teenagers use for "mailbox baseball" in the town I used to live in) it is easy for any passerby to open the mailbox and find out who I'm getting mail from. This does not mean that I have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and in certain circumstances this would be a serious offense (for example, if you happen to be under a restraining order or other legal constraints, looking in my mailbox would probably be enough to send you to jail - even though the mailbox is unlocked and standing by the side of the road). So the fact that my email is sent as unencrypted packets over an open network and anyone who can capture those packets can read them does not mean I have no expectation of privacy in my email communications. Likewise, we can have a reasonable expectation of privacy about our use of some website: even if our IP address is visible to that website, we would find it at least distasteful to see that their logs were made public and that information revealed. This is a moral judgement that implies a commonly-held expectation.

Again, our expectations are not always correctly aligned with reality, but this is useful data: it informs the discussion in useful ways. And in fact, this expectation, when widely held, is considered as evidence in law, so a "peeping Tom" who takes advantage of an unobstructed view of your bedroom gets no protection in law from the fact that your curtains happened to be open, if for example he sets up a camera and distributes your naked image to the world. You have the reasonable expectation of privacy in your house, period - this is not contingent on your policing all sight lines for voyeurs.


On the contrary side, the existence of services such as TOR and personal cryptography show us that we can create an enforceable right to privacy if we're willing to go to some effort about it, regardless of whether or not a consensus exists about "reasonable expectation" of privacy. Imagine a world in which all web requests, by default, were sent through an onion router: does image change your moral argument? It shouldn't, because the only difference between that world and this is a in terms of technical changes - this is a purely accidental feature of the world, not something that you should base a moral position on.

h4nnib4l, on 28 February 2013 - 03:07 PM, said:

Why are they logging the IP addresses?

This is the other important question, after, "what are they doing with the IP addresses" and "how are they securing the IP addresses?" and "what are their retention policies regarding the IP addresses?".

This post has been edited by jon.kiparsky: 28 February 2013 - 01:28 PM

[lordofduct]

farrell2k, on 28 February 2013 - 02:59 PM, said:

OK. I won't ask you. I'll tell you. Logging your IP address from a P2P network where any expectation of privacy is impossible, and then sending it to your ISPs does not constitute a violation of your privacy. Property rights, yeah, I don't even want to know how you managed that stretch.

You can see where I "managed that stretch" by actually reading what I have said so far, and have had to repeat. Just look a few posts back where I brought up privacy and property rights and their roles. It's what I was referencing by saying that.

[h4nnib4l]

Farrell2k, you're kind of arguing from a moving target. Your argument has now shifted to whether or not collecting IPs is a breach of privacy: an argument that neither lordofduct or I have taken a side on in this thread. We are speaking to whether or not the step before the logging, the part where they look through our data transactions, is a breach of privacy or not. The action that they choose to take (in this case, logging your IP and sending you nasty notes) is incidental, at least as it currently stands.

The point we've taken is simply that MPAA and RIAA getting ISPs to snoop through our transactions for their sake is a breach of privacy. I'd have to read the ToS from my ISP to know whether or not they reserve the right to snoop through unencrypted traffic or not (I don't know of any law preventing them from including that in the contract); however, if I, as an artist, tried to get my ISP to snoop through web traffic to see if any of my copyrighted music is being illegally shared, I'd be told to go fuck myself. Just like I can't go to the post office and ask them to look through all of the mail to see if someone is using my stolen checkbook to pay bills through the mail. Maybe some of us have just become a little sensitive to the MPAA and RIAA spending so much time trying to have so much influence over the internet. Yes, money = power, but that doesn't mean that it should be allowed. They seem to hold a surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) strong hold over government officials, and now they're trying to exert that influence over ISPs. We're simply saying that it's bogus.

This post has been edited by h4nnib4l: 28 February 2013 - 01:54 PM

[Craig328]

farrell2k, on 28 February 2013 - 02:59 PM, said:

lordofduct, on 28 February 2013 - 07:41 PM, said:

Privacy and property right laws.

OK. I won't ask you. I'll tell you. Logging your IP address from a P2P network where any expectation of privacy is impossible, and then sending it to your ISPs does not constitute a violation of your privacy. Property rights, yeah, I don't even want to know how you managed that stretch.

The day logging an IP address becomes a violation of privacy is a day the government truly oversteps its authority.

I've too stayed out of this discussion but that comment also got my attention.

I'll say this: logging my IP address (which is merely one of the endpoints in an electronic data exchange) in and of itself isn't any more illegal than the government recording the address my mail gets delivered to. But if you put the exchange in terms of traditional forms of communications, are you good with someone logging when you sent and received mail in your mailbox and then running off to tell someone else? Would you be okay if instead of mail, they were recording when you left and returned to your residence and whether you were carrying anything with you?

People tend to treat electronic media different than traditional media and that's because it wasn't something envisioned by the founding fathers when they wrote the constitution. Personally, I see little distinction between email and snail mail inasmuch as the laws of the land go:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That, of course, is the 4th Amendment and it's what keeps the government from opening your mail (amongst a great many other things). Now, mail fraud is indeed a crime (a federal felony, in fact) but mail fraud is dependent upon the content of the letter/parcel. To combat mail fraud, there isn't a practice of monitoring and opening your mail so as to make sure you're not breaking the law. That scenario is patently ridiculous and clearly unconstitutional. The monitoring portion (same goes for things like wiretapping) requires the existence of probable cause or reasonable suspicion in order for someone not a party to the exchange to monitor the event and a judge has to approve such and what they monitor has to be particular in that it applies to the suspicion/cause requirement.

As was described by Jon, can you have a reasonable expectation of privacy for what arrives in your mailbox? Legal precedent says "yes". A person can see who sent it and when (via the postmark) but not what's inside...and it IS considered your property so there are trespassing standards and such that could apply as well...but the contents have been adjudged to be privileged and confidential information and an expectation of privacy is wholly warranted. If that is the case, then anyone applying for permission to monitor your email transactions (or phone conversations or electronic parcels/files) cannot use the content of those communications as the basis for their reasonable suspicion/probable cause assertion. That's putting the cart before the horse.

I think crap like this WILL be interpreted one day (not by the "government" per se but by the Supreme Court) and activities like these will be found to be unconstitutional absent some other source for reasonable suspicion. The phone company cannot legally listen to your telephone calls and then report you for wire fraud...this is much the same.

This post has been edited by Craig328: 28 February 2013 - 02:32 PM

[no2pencil]

Logging IP Addresses != Examining data packet headers.

[depricated]

BenignDesign, on 27 February 2013 - 09:04 AM, said:

Stop doing illegal shit, modi. Then you don't have to worry about these things.

What's illegal about using P2P? The last few MMOs I played manage their downloads via P2P - there are countless legit uses for it.