are you kidding?

A government institution paying special attention to political organizations based on their supposed affiliations is, to quote our vice president, a big fucking deal.

You're missing the point. Landlines confer an expectation of privacy because they're a single physical entity which is often buried underground. Cell phones confer no expectation of privacy because they broadcast radio signals into the air, in all directions, for anyone to hear. If someone is talking on a cell phone on the sidewalk in front of your home, they are literally broadcasting a signal through your private property. Why would they ever expect no one to listen in, accidentally or intentionally? If your phone landlines ran through everyone's kitchen for square miles, and required no specialized equipment to be able to listen to it, would you expect to have privacy while using it?

Who cares about 20-30 years ago? Security didn't even matter much back then and we can't rely on people knowing the technical capabilities of the device they use.

You only care about the constitutionality of it now?

and I mention analog only because it was so widespread and went on for so long that it should really hammer the point home. It's still entirely possible but the technicals behind it are more complicated.

The point is: cell phones are just glorified radio transceivers.

Analog cell phones broadcasted voice communications over the air in the clear for decades.

The police, along with just about anyone, were free to listen in. You may not have heard about it because there wasn't much complaint about it.

It's actually ingrained in pop culture too, if you look out for criminals in thrillers who don't want to speak on a cell phone.

apparently the State Department agrees with you, as they said it's a possible violation as well. The Forbes article has been updated with the full text of their letter (with a relevant part here):

The DTCC/END is conducting a review of technical data made publicly available by Defense Distributed through its 3D printing website, DEFCAD.org, the majority of which appear to be related to items in Category I of the USML. Defense Distributed may have released ITAR-controlled technical data without the required prior authorization from the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), a violation of the ITAR.

They appear to want to take a better-safe-than-sorry approach until it can be properly reviewed.

Please don't shitpost like this.

Your sarcasm is lost in the text. All it can possibly do is convince people reading it that, somewhere out there, there is actually a horde of people who legitimately believe this.

If you're trying to make some edgy stance against government infringement of civil liberties, you're being fucking retarded and counterproductive.

thanks in advance,
everyone

thanks again.

anyway, judging by their mention of the State Department and trade controls, I'd have to guess that this has to do with regulation of exportation of arms and nothing to do with the second amendment.

I'm not sure how it's justified to prevent access by Americans, though, besides obvious technical limitations. Does anyone have a link to any kind of official statement on this? So far the only statement I've seen is a red bar at the top of their page and NPR reporting on the red bar at the top of their page. I'd love to see some actual statements.

I care if people aren't upset because it seems to me that the lack of upset is that people don't seem to have expectations of privacy when it comes to radio broadcasts.

Like I was originally saying, it's more like the expectation of privacy while holding a conversation in a restaurant. There certainly is an expectation, but it's not unreasonable for the police to overhear what you're saying.

Has this never resulted in denial of service?

Of course I do.

People have never seemed to be too upset about their cell phones, though.

uh, are you kidding?

It's because people paid for a game, were force-fed always-online-even-for-single-player, and then may have spent hours playing on the day in question.

How is that not disastrous?

Modern email is not almost entirely sent over SSL, and that wouldn't help much in the first place when it comes to government snooping. But yes, one of the major questions is about what the big corporations will do and how much pressure they're under. The big telcos decades ago wouldn't dream of giving up information like this to the government without a warrant, and may have even been held liable in court if they had. Telco and ISPs today seem either much more likely to be willing to do this.

with regards to legal expectations of privacy, it will always depend on how things are implemented, because the implementation we're talking about here is reality. No matter how forcefully we write our laws, they will lose every argument with reality.

I must read too many of these articles then, because people quoting Nixon (or other slightly less reprehensible characters) all the time has gotten to be repetitive, along the lines of godwin's law or "just a piece of paper".

In his most recent book, Liberty and Justice for Some, Glenn Greenwald posits that the flagrant, unpunished, lawlessness in high places which is currently destroying democracy in the United States started with Ford's pardon of Nixon. The other half of Greenwald's argument is that for everyone else, there is no liberty or justice because the government is no longer obeying the Constitution or following due process.

  The subject of this Slashdot article is a perfect example of the second half of Greenwald's argument. In a few short words the GP neatly tied it with the first half. That's why, for me, it was funny and enjoyable and it made me think.

I wouldn't really disagree with that. Especially nerve-grating is how so many people, from every bit of the political spectrum, look to the President as being able to wield some kind of magical powers over society. A significant percentage of children and adults wouldn't even be able to express what the President's actual job is, in large part because of how pervasive this kind of conversation has become -- also seeming to have taken hold with Nixon.

It certainly explains a lot about Dick Cheney's aspirations for transforming the office of Vice President.

The two of us understanding the sarcasm has nothing to do with how productive or counterproductive it is.

These kinds of comments are posted by the dozen, attached to every article with even a remote connection to politics or law, and they ultimately serve no purpose. Is it funny? Does it make you think? Is it enjoyable?

The answer to all of those is no. It's lazy, without even an ounce of effort going into its writing, and it only engenders similar commentary.

Your post, for example, would be welcomed for drawing the parallels between how some people apparently behave and the actions of someone like Nixon. The comment I originally applied to doesn't do that and is essentially nothing other than a form of submission to anyone who would impose their will upon the poster.

If you don't think that's counterproductive, well...

right.

When you send an email, or any internet traffic, you're basically shipping it out to the wild because of the internet's packet-switched nature. Phones, being circuit switched, pass through a network but have a pretty obviously higher nature of privacy.

I just think the analogy isn't totally unreasonable though, especially with the prevalenc of wifi and public internet points. It certainly raises lots of interesting legal questions, like how the password-protected nature of accessing an email account affects your expectation of privacy, and things like WPA2 encryption, which encrypts your traffic over the air to the router, but not on the wire after the router ships it out. It of course begs the question of how and where law enforcement could access internet traffic in the case of an ISP or email provider or whoever refusing without a warrant, which is also in the news this past week.

All in all, I do think most laypeople would be a little shocked that email is simple plaintext and easily readable, which indicates they have an (unrealistic) expectation of privacy, and this goes for almost all internet traffic. It's simultaneously very public and very private. Ultimately I would not be surprised in the least if, in the near but not immediate future, "envelopes" become commonplace in order to satisfy's the general population's desire for an explicit expectation of privacy in the form of better encryption and security standards and practices seeing widespread use.

It's not strange at all. Isn't this a technical site?

Email is sent plaintext over the wire. There's no envelope.

It's like complaining about someone being able to hear your radio broadcasts in plain language. Or overhear your conversation in a restaurant.