Friday, May 12, 2006

You'll get your mail after I'm done with it.


Via Liberal Catnip, we learn that an astonishing percentage of Americans seem perfectly content to let the government rummage through their private data without a court order or search warrant. Apparently, these people have thoroughly embraced the philosophy of, "Hey, I have nothing to hide so it doesn't bother me."

It's not at all clear that you can even get through to these folks anymore so, rather than try to reason with them, let me suggest another course of action. If someone tells you that they don't mind the government logging their phone calls or going through their mail, ask them if it's all right if you can do it.

Ask them if they'd mind if, before they got home from work, you went out to their mailbox, collected their mail, sat down on their front steps and proceeded to go through it, letter by letter, opening what looked interesting, perusing personal correspondence and so on.

"No way," they'd howl, "that's different!" In fact, no, it's not. Because unless the government gets a court order or warrant of some kind, they have absolutely no more right to dig through your personal life than I do. And if you don't mind the government doing it, then by extension you should have no problem with me doing it, either. I'm betting you'd see a real change of attitude in a hurry.

We're not done with this.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there anything in Canadian law that protects us from our Government doing the same phonewise? Might be something to look into /before/ we get into it up here?

I'm also curious as to whether those American companies have Canadian dealings and whether they have turned over phone records of Canadians to the Bush administration as well.

Are we going to see more Canadians who foolishly believe they are not guilty of anything travel south and get detained/disappeared like Maher Arar on the basis of their phone call patterns?

But hey, at least now we know what the phone companies traded to have their call to control the internet favorably looked upon. It looks like American net neutrality is a goner.

I wish this was as crazy as it sounded a few months ago.

Anonymous said...

Don't worry Cynic apparently the Ramussan Poll was gamed to produced the most favorable result possible for "approval" of wiretapping.
As the program becomes more widely know watch the polls turn sharply negative.
The same thing happened when the story broke that Bush had evaded the FISA Court to monitor international traffic; thus violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and commiting a criminal Act. Bush claims that he has power to do this under Article II of the US constitution (Presidential Powers), but most people think his argument is weak and having re-read the Constitution I have to agree.

The think I don't understand is that FISA was set up to protect the President politically from charges of interference. Why Bush would go out of his way to break the law is odd. Some say that Cheney is behing it because Cheney was part of the Nixon administration and never accepted the restrictions on the President that the FISA law put in place. If that is the case Bush is a fool for placing his trust in Cheney.

The American Anthropologist said...

The reason Bush went around the FISA court is not because of Cheney, it is because you just can't ask for a warrant for millions of people.

Poindexter and other Iran-Contra guys did the same thing as before (with the Total Information Awareness data mining program). Did something nefarious, got told to stop, did it in secret instead, got caught, claimed patriotism and privilege.
They'll be hosting right wing talk radio in a decade or two.

Mike said...

niles -

Section 7 of the Charter guarantees us the right to privacy and security of the person (except as can be reasonably justified in a free and democratic society, as per Section 1).

Toss on top of that federal statues like PIPEDA, and it is clearly illegal without a warrant.

Now, we certainly have the Constitutional right for this kind of thing not to happen. Sadly, we usually have to find out about it first.