Ironic that we bitch out the government taking our liberties while we pour over the personal correspondence of the victims of a tragedy.
Democracy is a mirror. If you don't like what you see, start by changing yourself. If privacy is important to you, then don't read the personal pager messages (illegally obtained?) just because they are posted on the internet and everyone else is doing it.
Others have opined that unencrypted radio broadcasts can't reasonably be considered private (they're certainly way less inherently private than words written on paper in my view), but I would add that the magnitude of the attack gives us a greater right to read them.
(The same way we typically don't feel guilty about reading Anne Frank's private diaries following the Nazi atrocities and her death in a concentration camp.)
Yes, it is. If someone leaves their journal lying in a coffee shope, I won't read it. If my neighbor leaves their Wi-Fi open, I won't hack it. If someone is talking a few meters away, I won't use eavesdropping device to listen to them, and if someone sends an unencrypted communication, I won't read it just because I have the technical ability to do so.
May I am slightly mixing my definition of personal with private, but where is the respect for other people?
"It's not personal if you broadcast it unencrypted" is the same line of thought as "she was asking to get raped". Just my opinion.
>If someone leaves their journal lying in a coffee shop
Not even remotely near the same thing. Can we agree to stop making crappy physical analogies, please?
> If my neighbor leaves their Wi-Fi open, I won't hack it.
It's not "hacking" (or even a little bit unethical) to associate to an open AP - it amounts to an advertisement of a free service available. Really you're not crossing any creeper lines there unless you start rifling through the other computers connected to that AP.
"Not even remotely near the same thing. Can we agree to stop making crappy physical analogies, please?"
No, that is exactly the same thing. Private correspondence has the expectation of being private. Just because you have the technical ability to do something, doesn't mean you should.
Democracy is a mirror. If you don't like what you see, start by changing yourself. If privacy is important to you, then don't read the personal pager messages (illegally obtained?) just because they are posted on the internet and everyone else is doing it.