If law enforcement has a reason to obtain data, they should be able to get a warrant to obtain data for people of direct interest. But especially the federal gov should not be able to have data that they cannot legally obtain directly from the population. What good is a law and right of the population, if it can be trivially circumvented?
Having data on everyone and then only using it against people they want to use it against is exactly what the Stasi did. Obviously this is their dream come true --just a little to late for them.
> What good is a law and right of the population, if it can be trivially circumvented
U.S. v. Miller [1], which established the third-party doctrine, turned on whether "the business records of the banks" to which the defendant could "assert neither ownership nor possession" could be accessed by subpoena versus court-authorized warrant. (The context turns on bank records. Smith v. Maryland [2] expands it to "phone numbers [conveyed] to the telephone company.")
This seems trivially fixable with legislation. Requests made by the government to third parties in respect of specific persons' non-public (even if not strictly confidential) records require court approval or the first party's consent. Also, easier than trying to expand he definition of "houses, papers, and effects" [3] to cover our data in various clouds: defining, in statute, that there is a legitimate and reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers one dials to speak to or message with another person or persons, e-mails one sends to a small group of people, handles one provides a messaging service marketed as encrypted, and articles (e.g. documents, photos and work products) uploaded to a third party's server for personal use.
Agreed, but this is something that has been going on for decades. Their excuse - believe it or not, I can dig up the source if you want - is that as long as nobody looks at the data it is ok to have it. I thought that was being incredibly economical with words, clearly that is not the intent of the law.
It's ironic that this is what all repressive governments do. They hold data and when they need it they spring it. But I guess this escapes them -or maybe not.
Having data on everyone and then only using it against people they want to use it against is exactly what the Stasi did. Obviously this is their dream come true --just a little to late for them.