The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age

In my last post I mused on the nature of data and how the information about us defines who we are.  I was spurned to write this and finished off the post presenting disappoint with Verizon, my cell carrier, and their failure to protect users' privacy and respect their charge in holding data about us.  Lately Verizon has been in the news for handing over call records to the NSA, so the wound has had salt thrown in it rather than had time to heal, so to speak.  In my investigations into jumping ship from a company so cavalier about it's responsibility to protect who I am in the form my data I've had some interesting experiences.

I sent an email to Sprint asking if their company does anything to protect users' data and privacy.  Their response was,

Sprint as a company is not commenting on this report. We do not have 

any information to share, and that Sprint will not be commenting on the 

subject. 

which I found alarmingly curt and evasive.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting anything terribly profound or telling, I was expecting a sorta non-committal PR department generated canned response along the lines of, "Sprint is committed to protecting customers' data and ensuring their privacy, however we still must comply with any lawful U.S. Government agency request."  There's no real way to peer behind the curtain and discern why they responded with the air of, "Oh geez I don't want to talk about this please don't make me say anything why are you doing this to me?"  My speculation on the subject, which I feel such a curious response deserves, would be that either Sprint is just as uncaring when it comes to customers' data and privacy and can provide no unembarrassing response to a customer asking these type of questions, or that they are actually fearful of what might happen should they take a stand.

Both could of course be true, in fact the latter may be the cause and the former the effect.  I find the latter more interesting, though.  It's easy to dismiss concern with how a company protects (or more often fails to protect) our information as unfounded worry about "government conspiracies" (in fact, that's exactly who a T-Mobile salesperson ended up characterizing my concern when asking about it at a store location).  While the fact that most citizens probably won't be much affected is true and the majority of people (including myself with all my seditious comments coming out on this blog) aren't interesting, influential, or dangerous enough for the government to take the effort to spy on, the issue is far from unimportant for everyone save a few security advocates, legal scholars, and tech enthusiasts.

As I pointed out in my last post we're seeing the importance of the physical diminish.  The things that are important to us are increasingly in the form of data accessed in a number of different ways?  As these changes in the way we communicate, work, and create emerge so the laws which will govern these new methods of living.  And they are being changed.

"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause."  This worked well for many years when communication took place between two people in the form of physical letters that they could keep on their property and evidence showed up as physical items that, again, could be held on someone's property. These laws are essentially being re-written as more and more of what's important to us has a digital presence.

The fourth amendment seems to grow out of the presumption of innocence.  We aren't to be observed, investigated, or seized until some degree of proof of guilt can be obtained.  This is what's being eroded by modern electronic surveillance.  It echos the complaints by so many in gaming when considering many invasive digital rights management (DRM) systems, "I'm being treated like a criminal when I haven't done anything wrong.  They're just assuming I'm going to steal things."

Privacy and the internet is always, and may always be, a thorny issue.  There's many conflicting theories, ranging from the internet being a surveillance state, to the assumption of privacy which is continually being shown to be unsupported, to complex privacy policies written by lawyers and mostly ignored by users, to understanding that privacy is only there when one takes the steps to encrypt their data and secure their connections.  The internet is increasingly how we live our lives-in both private and public contexts-and after fighting for our rights and freedoms in the physical world we need to take up the fight once more for cyberspace, whether that means holding elected officials accountable, suffering the inconvenience of using security software, or considering privacy and data security when selecting service providers.