You're saying that the onus on people if they don't want others to take advantage of them is to hide all their vulnerable points. And I'm saying that's the sign of a lawless anarchy where people aren't presumed to have rights.

A very apt parallel. Under American Common Law, your likeness - as well as your signature - is your private property. People can no more snap you without your consent without being liable for violating your property rights than they can take an image of your signature and print it onto whatever they like. American Common Law remains in effect, but has been forgotten amid a heap of baseless legislation that lacks the authority to actually be law. People in the U.S. have forgotten their system, in favor of a johnny-come-lately. As one result, basic concepts and premises of law ("maxims") have been lost to them, and we get news stories in which some new situation brought about by new technology makes it all seem like an open question again. It's not.

And they now have lasers that can be pointed at windows and pick up conversations based on how the glass vibrates. The laser and the person using them are both located outside the house, so according to your reasoning it's perfectly fine as well. So, be sure to pick up some air pumps made for aquariums at the pet store and tape them to your windows, or it's your fault for being lax on the data security.

If my neighbors are installing surveillance equipment in order to overhear me shouting at my wife, and they couldn't overhear it any other way, they're not going to last as my neighbors for long.

I'm typing this reply from my laptop, in a public location. As I type, there is cash in my wallet as we speak. Just sitting there. For anybody to pick up and take! Mind you, they'd need to have developed certain skills in order to do so. But they could do it! And it sounds like according to your reasoning, if they did it would be my fault because I expected the rest of the world not to deliberately attempt to pick my pocket. Whereas I'm more in favor of the traditional Middle Eastern response to people who are caught pickpocketing, in order to discourage it.

Of course it's no different, if you're arguing the issue in the context they've handed you.

The actual difference is that before things like the DMCA, before a lot of this corrupt baseless legislation got passed, there were no victimless crimes in this country! You weren't hauled in before a magistrate and tried in a chancery court for offenses "against the state". You were brought to court when there was an injured party: you had either detrimented their right to life, liberty or property, or you'd defaulted on a contract with them. That's it! Today, the whole legal system's been turned on its ear and we now routinely talk about crimes in terms of what legislation someone did or didn't contravene, but the premise of the law as something designed to deal with personal injuries and detriments against the rights of ordinary citizens has been so long lost that most people have even ceased to think about the law in those terms. When that's the very purpose for which we initially designed it!

I understand your point. And if the data on those papers requires certain software to read and decode, that is a form of encryption. Someone has to make a deliberate effort to get at it, meaning it's not just lying in the street for anyone to read. Further, if the data is your own, you have a right to your privacy despite the fact that it doesn't lie within the walls of your house. Not because it's trademarked or copywritten for business purposes, but simply because it's your private property and that's a basic right.

If your argument were correct, newsstands would have had no way to prosecute shoplifters all these years.

No, it was half-in, half-out. By that I mean it was being used in their homes, and "leaked" out because that's what airwaves do. Which isn't typically a big deal, since one hardly expects people to be sitting outside trying to pick it up. That's why this story is such a big deal; this time, someone was. I realize that it [purportedly] was unintentional, which is the only exonerating factor.

You argue that no, the exonerating factor was that Google should have been allowed to do this intentionally if it so desired. That the onus is on the private citizens to encrypt everything just in case someone is out there actively trying to sniff their data. Which is a distinct difference in mentality.

There's nothing technologically complicated about using a handgun either, and using one could certainly save you from a violent mugging. Whenever you leave your home, there is also a slight chance that it will rain no matter what the weather report says. You might get slammed by a car as you cross the street, therefore you should never leave the house without a pair of clean underwear on, in case you have an unanticipated ambulance ride to the hospital to worry about. And you might run into some tourists from Spain who don't speak English while you're out. Therefore, you should never leave the house without a loaded handgun, a large umbrella, a pair of clean underwear on, and a Spanish-to-English translation dictionary. Otherwise, it's your own damn fault.

They were using Kismet, so you're technically correct.

My point, however, remains. Kismet does not come standard, you have to purposely install it - usually to sniff another person's otherwise-private network traffic. If Google's sniffing had been deliberate, my point is that they would have been in the wrong for so doing. You seem to be adopting the position that no, that's perfectly alright, the citizenry had no reasonable expectation of a right to privacy there. That packet sniffing, as deliberate as it usually has to be, is just as easy to do and probably as someone glancing in your window. And that is wrong.

I think you missed my point there. I know this is Slashdot, but when I mentioned Zero-Days I was getting at legal exploits, not literal technological ones. Stuff without a lot of case precedent about it yet, such as intercepted wifi data, which Google - if they had done it deliberately, and happily this appears not to be the case - would have been able to take advantage of. In other words, using the fact that technology innovates faster than case precedent is established, to take advantage of people.

You have now dispensed with a free society's right to have open, unencrypted wifi hotspots in order to support an argument that anybody should be allowed to play Peeping Tom on someone else's data, just because they have the technological ability.

If we tried the same argument with personal defense, society would become an arms race in which everyone had to pack an AK-47 and Kevlar before leaving the house, because any random schmuck could light them up on their way to work. After all, they have no right not to get shot at and taking the appropriate precautions are very technologically simple to learn. They could be taught to our kids in kindergarten.

And I'm pointing out that the point of having a government is to preserve our rights against those who would encroach upon them, precisely so that society doesn't have to become a situation in which the best-armed, or the most-technologically-literate, or the most-anything-else, don't hold the rest of us in sway. The point, in short, is to have a reasonable expectation of a society which upholds our rights and freedoms. So that we don't have to all go out with Kevlar and AK's every day.

Hopefully you now understand the point I'm trying to make there, and aren't just trying to avoid hearing it.

Yes, when do we go after Microsoft for leaving that packet sniffing option on as a default installation option?

You're right of course.

Sending out vans en masse to peoples' neighborhoods with equipment and software that's specifically designed to pluck wifi traffic out of the airwaves is no different from strolling down the sidewalk and happening to glance into someone's window. Why, just the other day I was on my way home, glanced over, and idly picked up several packets of someone's e-mail and a bit of their usenet traffic before I could think to look away. How silly of me.

Thank you, no.

The wifi data was half-in, half-out of their private homes. It was meant to be used by them, in their homes, and technology had to be specifically modified and sent out in order to intercept it. There's the basis of a reasonable expectation of a right to privacy right there. For someone to obtain that data, they have to go out of their way to nab it. If Google itself had condoned it, there would be little difference between that and seeking to obtain Zero-Day exploits to commercial systems - with the exception that these are private individuals, not mere corporations.

With all the hullabaloo from the MPAA and RIAA about ownership rights to for-profit data, we have at least as much right to our data as private citizens. Otherwise there's no point to having a government, if it doesn't uphold our rights.

And if Matthew Shepard didn't want to get savagely beaten to death by a group of bigots, he should have kept his sexual orientation a secret as well.

Consider what you're saying. It's like condoning someone who breaks and enters into peoples' houses and goes reading through their papers and personal effects, and saying the problem is that they didn't have a secure enough vault in their home.

Perhaps we should encrypt everything, all the time, petrified that someone unintended will snoop on us and find out about it. Perhaps the problem is that we've been too transparent and open about how we live our lives, not that someone else shouldn't be prying into them. However, before adopting Pig Latin as the national language, let's gloss over the Fourth Amendment for a moment.

Hmm. Seems like our right to privacy was pretty important when we founded the U.S.. We didn't want our government invading it, so I doubt we would've wanted anyone else to either. Debate resolved; there's already been a determination on the matter over two hundred years ago, so the matter seems rather dated and redundant now.

Touché, sir. You cut me to the quick.

Certainly. Which word gave you difficulty?

We appear to be using two different definitions of "accountability".

People used to be accountable to themselves and each other - and through them, the law. If you violated rights, you had to make amends or become an outlaw. Laws were made to uphold standards of rights and values that people had in common - they were a formalized system of basic human decency.

In time, the representatives we delegated to maintain that system turned the concept of "accountability" on its ear, pretending that they, as public officials, were entities in and of themselves - with an agenda all their own. So today, people often think of "accountability" only in their redefined, bastardized usage: accountability to the whimsical edicts of legislators. But this is the idea of accountability being made to stand on its' head. There is no accountability without self-accountability, just as there is no control without self-control. The idea of being held accountable to an arbitrary, whimsical system is the idea of being accountable to a non-system - in other words, arbitrary edicts and mandates from authority figures. Slavery. In this modern usage, "accountability" doesn't mean anything valid. It becomes a socially acceptable substitute for "slavery", and I'm not using it that way because it would be rather bizarre and unconscionable. I mean real, legitimate, true accountability.

Chaos is just as much a threat to rights as tyranny. Is that not self-evident to you?

It's like they're people who are tired of freezing, and so they set themselves on fire. Spectacular, but utterly useless.

Groups like Anonymous seem to get quite a kick out of thumbing their noses at the authority figures in the room. If only they'd realize that as members of We, the People, we are the authority figures, and the politicians are required to be our representatives, they could start reasserting a legitimate, functional society. And they'd realize that doesn't happen by adopting the position of the incorrigible adolescent truant; it takes people actively being functional human beings. That's the only way you get a functional society.

Can someone please tell me what's supposed to be so politically edgy about creating yet another disordered, unregulated system?

That kind of jumbling and lack of accountability is pretty much the problem with our political system, and yet Anonymous sells it as subversive and avant-garde. It's not.

Then when you ask Anonymous what it thinks it's trying to accomplish, rather than sending you a sheaf of redacted government memos they just tell you, "There is no such thing as Anonymous." If life were a party, Anonymous would be the geeky attention-seeking teen off in the corner snorting handfuls of GHB.

It'd be nice if groups "there's no such thing as" didn't make headlines so often. I can't take them seriously.

Politicians are a lot less quick to use that, "Only criminals demand their right to privacy" routine after a few demands for public strip-searches.

Interestingly, the political corruption in the U.S. is getting resolved by, of all people, the military.

Slashdot, your innuendos are getting worse.

That makes sense. A good workaround might be a Javascript CAPTCHA-like element; I'm not sure how advanced the anti-CAPTCHA technology has gotten yet.

If the male representative you're telegramming is an older "fundamentalist" conservative, you might get better results with a Chippendale.

It sounds like what these guys need is a simple website capability, easily feasible in something like Drupal, that would enable users to click for or against an issue. In addition to cutting down on spam, it would enable constituents to immediately see how much activity there has been on an issue. You could even do a Facebook-style "Like", or enable constituents to Tweet their feedback. And if there's no API, it makes it more difficult to mass-spam the feature.

Seems to me they get a lot of spam because e-mail is about the only internet-based feedback system they have in place.

Note that this will not address the issue of money-guzzling politicians who are too corrupt to be motivated by feedback.

Then by that reasoning, chiseled stone tablets ought to carry a lot more weight!

Right. On. Thank you for the info!

Here's to the day when instead of mandatory school hours, we stay at home and play things like Gene Splicer Hero.