DNI Office Asks Why People Trust Facebook More Than the Government 273
Daniel_Stuckey writes "General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Robert S. Litt explained that our expectation of privacy isn't legally recognized by the Supreme Court once we've offered it to a third party. Thus, sifting through third party data doesn't qualify 'on a constitutional level' as invasive to our personal privacy. This he brought to an interesting point about volunteered personal data, and social media habits. Our willingness to give our information to companies and social networking websites is baffling to the ODNI. 'Why is it that people are willing to expose large quantities of information to private parties but don't want the Government to have the same information?,' he asked."
More than ability to tax, is the lack of sharing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Executive Power (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. To sum it in two words: Police Powers.
FB doesn't have those do they DNI?
B.T.W. and for what its worth- When signing the Act in 1947 creating the CIA, President Truman refused to create the DNI as it now stands because: "People will not tolerate a Gestapo in America."
Probably because Facebook doesn't deploy guns? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a knock one day at your door. There's a man at the door, he says "You must give me your money, you don't have a choice in the matter, but don't worry, I'm going to give it away in your name."
You wouldn't trust a crackpot like that with your property, why should you place trust when that crackpot is the government?
Besides being completely wrong, it shows how little the government thinks of property rights. The information belongs to your phone providers/Facebook/etc, it's their hard drives, you need a narrowly-scoped warrant to compel them to hand over that information, end of discussion.
But even suppose there were no property rights in this context. Could a regular person, or even a well funded company like Facebook, possibly get away with demanding personal records from other companies? No? Then it's not really public information, is it?
Re:Executive Power (Score:4, Interesting)
And in the age of the "privacy" policy, users have at least a basic idea of what comes of their data shared with a company.
Further, information like call "meta" data is something I may agree to because there is no other way to use the product, ie, the phone company needs that info to bill me accurately. Were there any other way around this I would of course not allow them to collect that information. So to call it sharing is really a reach.
Re:Executive Power (Score:5, Interesting)
I would add that people give their information voluntarily to these third parties, while the government takes it using the threat of violence. People give their information to third parties because the third party offers a service for storing and distributing their information to select friends and acquaintances. The government takes and distributes information to an untold number of alphabet soup agencies for some abstract, unproven and unconstitutional notion of security.
Furthermore, the very definition of sharing information at all requires that you do it with a third party. So does the ODNI suggest that the government be privy to communication between me and my doctor? Lawyer? Wife?! That we're even at the point that government officials are asking these questions is proof that the government has grown too big and powerful for the good of the people.
“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.” -Thomas Jefferson
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -James Madison
Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium.
Re:Executive Power (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously? Gee, I don't know... maybe it's because those private parties can't ruin your fucking life like a government can?
Hello? Your student loans called. Something about ruining your life? I took a message.
When was the last time Facebook's swat team raided someone's house, taking all posessions and ruining their job/social image?
Depends... Ever posted a link to a torrent?
Now granted if a company the size of Facebook decided to target an individual, that person would have a very hard time defending due to the large mismatch in resources. But this kind of this doesn't happen often, because it's not really profitable.
That's adorable. You do realize that they are targetting individuals, right? That's their whole business plan. The more data you volunteer with your name on it, the more valuable your marketing profile becomes, which they sell in aggregate to third parties.
On the other hand, targetting alleged law-breaking individuals is part of the government's job and is a regular occurence.
Yes, amazingly, the government does try to put a priority on investigating, arresting, and charging people who engage in criminal activity like murder, rape, or double parking.
The government is granted a lot of power for the good of society -- power to decide the fate of any citizen or company. In exchange for that power, they are held to a much higher standard and have a responsibility to implement the most stringent safeguards. However inconvenient those safeguards might be, it's the price of maintaining public confidence.
Actually, they aren't. The power is derived from the consent of the governed. I think there's something about that in the Declaration of Independence. And as far as higher standards... I think you're mistaken. The standards have been astonishingly low ever since the Patriot Act was enacted, and continues to drop like a lead balloon. And there is no public confidence in the government... approval level is right now somewhere around 28%, last I checked.
Now with all that out of the way, the reason why people don't trust the government isn't because of any of the things you mentioned. I think I've made that rather clear. The reason people don't trust the government is because much of what you hear about in the news and elsewhere is politically slanted. The government is taking punitive action against people for political reasons on a regular basis. And they trust corporations more because they're not paying to be persecuted by them -- it's an exchange of goods and services. Perhaps an unequal exchange, even a grossly unfair exchange, but willing nonetheless. Taxes aren't voluntary. As well, corporations aren't as often politically motivated as they are profit-oriented. While that may in practice result in even greater evils in society, people understand the desire for profit. Nobody says "I think I'll be poor!" So greed is something most people can identify with, unlike the government, whose persecutions, show trials, and ever-shifting political landscape, eventually winds up shitting on something you value. It's this inconsistency that makes the government untrustworthy... and it comes from the fact that the government isn't one large organization -- it's a bunch of them, often with opposing goals, and working at cross-purposes. The end result often appears both random and malicious. Some would argue it goes beyond mere appearance and is actually random and malicious, but that's a discussion for another day.
TL;DR - The government is political. Corporations aren't, they're profit-oriented.
Re:Executive Power (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously? Gee, I don't know... maybe it's because those private parties can't ruin your fucking life like a government can?
I do not think that it is just that. Some years back when Facebook started, one could have an account by providing a VALID ACADEMIC email address ONLY- that, implied that one had to do with a serious social academic tool that allowed to connect with other academics, and not yet another place to post pictures of cats and sandwiches. So many people bited and just gave away their personal information. Of course, Facebook turned a couple of years later, showing its real face and bringing chat to the masses, and it was only then that people started not giving away their real names.
When was the last time Facebook's swat team raided someone's house, taking all posessions and ruining their job/social image?
Indirectly, all the time: do you seriously think that there is no backdoor for the authorities in Facebook?
Re:Executive Power (Score:5, Interesting)
Just scroll down a few slashdot stories to see some examples of government abuse of power [slashdot.org] and ways it over-reacts with police force against private citizens. Heck, My home state now has a moritorium on the death penalty because we kept sending innocent people to death row.
If the people of the State of Illinois killed innocent people, does that make them all murderers?