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.

Our Data is Who We Are

 The physical is becoming less and less important in the modern world.  Sure, there will always be a need for physical mediums (after all "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter"), but information is what reigns supreme in importance.  This has always been true, in many ways.  As Carl Sagan said, "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, it's the way those atoms are put together."  In another way, humanity has been marching toward this for ages; Since the invention of writing a stone could be transformed into the law of the land or God, a history of a people, or an agreement between two parties.  The invention and standardization of money intensified this.

The idiom that you can find out a lot about a person by going through their trash may still be true, but it's been found that with a handful of data readily made available people can know exactly who we are (in this study 4 locational data points were enough to identify 95% of participants).  While it's (probably) true that you wouldn't be you without your physical body, too often we forget that we wouldn't be who we are without our memories, habits, and interpersonal connections-all of which computers are increasingly involved in and therefore archiving.

As a Verizon wireless customer I was devastated to see this report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation surveying different companies and what measures they were taking to protect users' privacy.  I've known for a while that Verizon was kind of a scumbag company, managing to continue living only because they've acquired a great deal of infrastructure.  When (also scumbag, when it comes to users' data) companies like Comcast and Facebook (I'm not including Google even though many might have worries about the amount of data they collect because they did manage to collect 5 out of 6 stars in this survey, and I genuinely appreciate the company) as well as the two lower end Apple and AT&T still manage to find some way in which they can protect users' data rights are still beating out my carrier, I worry.

I'm seriously considering leaving Verizon, and would probably side with Sprint.  The financial, coverage, and overall convenience implications makes me hesitate, but I really feel like making sure a company that isn't making any effort to protect my digital self shouldn't be supported by my money.  I'd love to leave Comcast for the same reason, and may look into campaigning within my complex to get a different service provider.  The power a service provider has in my life is unnerving, considering how important my data is to me.  After all, in a very real way the data about me is who I am.

Sharing an Idea

Since I just got married I've been posting about marriage, relationships, and the like lately and I've seen an interesting thing happen, people responded.  I got comments, page views, and people telling me how much they liked my last post.  It's always nice to hear feedback from others and find out people are actually paying attention.  Still, part of me is actually a little disheartened by this surge of interest, because it carries an implication that people didn't read, or just plain didn't care about what I was writing before.

I wouldn't have predicted my newer writings would have eclipsed some of my others, because I find them more personal in scope.  Curiosities of my personality, musings on relationships (of which there's already enough literature to fill several libraries of Alexandria, and what I bring surely cannot be that novel), and altogether introspection on how I feel during such a pivotal moment of my life.  Maybe I should be honored and awed that others care about enough that they love my introspection.  Maybe they feel they're getting to know me better through my writings, and that's what engages them so deeply, and again I should be cheerful to know people like getting to know me.

But perhaps that's also just it.  Yes that personal side who loves his beautiful new wife and was eager to marry her is there.  Yes, I have thoughts and feelings about romance and love like most everyone else.  Yes, I am relate-able in those ways and those are all important to me.  There are other things that are deeply meaningful to me, though.  These are things that run from boring to meaningless to spurned to intimidating (and therefore avoided as much as possible) to much of the population in which I live.

Often what I write blog posts if not necessarily to change vernacular perspective at least to offer a different one.  I find topics of science, mathematics, and technology - and especially the public's interaction with these - of immense importance.  These are the ventures of human endeavor that will shape the future to which hurtling toward us faster and faster every day (ponder a moment on the technologies changing the way we communicate and relate to one another that have come to fruition in the last ten to twenty years) and the lijera (Spanish for lightness, but possibly carrying an extra connotation or two that made me want to use it in place of an English word here) with which people take these today is distressing to me.

I was once asked by an aunt something like, "What's it like to be as smart as you are?"  My answer was a jocular but wistful, "Lonely," and then by way of explanation, "When I talk about something that I find fascinating and then see the eyes of whomever I'm speaking with glaze over what do I do?  Pretend something important to me isn't or speak without regard to a fellow human being."

A Personal Oddity of Emotional Expression

I'm a scientist.  I'm not a poet, an artist, writer, or orator.  Well, I think there's a pretty convincing case to be made that mathematics and seeing the beauty of nature in the laws that govern it have artistic merit, I'm at least an amateur writer (I have, like I suspect many do, a few beginnings to books, short stories, or articles), and am actually a pretty decent public speaker (though maybe not anymore, I haven't really done any public speaking for quite a while), but I'm speaking here to my outlook on the world and my communication with others and a scientific outlook has strongly influenced these aspects of who I am.  There's two things that I find especially influenced by this background; objectivity and concern for clarity.

I explain that so I can explain this, it's very difficult and a little odd for me to tell my wife I love her.  Not because I don't, I'm madly in love with her.  Not because I think there's anything wrong or strange about it either, but because it's so hard to know what I'm saying.  Often when we are sitting in our apartment together I let those words, "I love you," sum things up, hoping that my feelings are transmitted correctly.  In other moments though, when I want to expound on what that means, on the way I'm excited by her beautiful form, the softening spark in me of her amazing smile, the joy I take in her fun personality, or the deep passion when I notice how well read and thoughtful she is, I don't know what to say.

One thing is I feel like I've said it all before, and I hate repetition.  Rather, perhaps, I know that expressing something in a new way is more powerful than repeating something you've heard before.  Heard enough times anything can seem clichéd.  How many different ways are there to say, "You're beautiful and I'm very attracted to you," though?  I have a fairly formidable vocabulary, but still there are only so many synonyms for beautiful, happy, and love that one can use meaningfully.

Often, and bear with me through the cheesiness of this statement, words seem inadequate.  I can tell how I'm feeling, but how do I express that?  And moreover, when I feel something so powerfully, how do I express that with equal power?  If I'm to be clear in communicating my feelings, what do I do when I feel something which seems more potent than the words I've been using.  Moments where recognition of all her glorious beauty flares up in a way that I guess I've felt before, but certainly feels new and exhilarating surely can't be expressed in a simple, "You're so pretty/beautiful/stunning/gorgeous/sexy," when I've already said that many times before, ¿can they?

I've mentioned before that I have a certain emotional austerity.  That doesn't mean I don't feel strongly, I do. It does mean I usually hold off on expressing what I feel, and moreover that when I do I try to strengthen what I say about those feelings in an alloy of emotion, thought, reason, possibly evidence, and probably sources.  I can't really do that when I express my love for my wife.  I know it's my subjective experience, I know that it's the way I feel, heck I even have an idea of some of the neurochemistry and cerebral circuitry that's powering and processing it, but still my love is real, and I want to let her know that.  I'm learning a lot as I learn how to say it.

Taxes and Taxation

I recently did my taxes and have also been reading The Federalist Papers and have been thinking a lot about taxation lately.  One thing that always strikes me at tax time is the labyrinthine extensiveness of the tax code.  I'm terrified of filing next year, trying to figure out how I'll file after getting married, having an HSA, and who knows what else is still to come.  The complexity of the tax code is always what has struck me as the most immoral thing about it.
In The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton said, "The genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws." (emphasis added)  We are living a world of privacy concerns.  We watch our internet service providers eavesdrop on their customers at the behest of the entertainment industry or for advertising profit, the web services we use constantly collect that details of how we're using them, we keep devices in our pockets which may upload our exact location throughout our day, and we're told to be careful about grocery store discount cards as they can easily lead our eating habits getting sold to an insurance company to raise our rates.  In this world of shrinking privacy our government should be working to protect what we have left, but instead we see it complacent and then at tax time bold faced enough to ask and expect us to answer a slew of questions about our investments, medical bills, work location, housing, and 'anything else you might have missed.'

An uncle of mine that prepares taxes has said that he would be unable to do so without the aid of computers.  The fact that we have created such a situation is ludicrous. I have more than one uncle who makes pretty decent money preparing people's taxes, so let me make one thing very clear: I don't think there's inherent corruption in the tax preparation industry.  There's competition, people concern themselves with following the law, and try to be honest.  That said, I don't think it should exist.  The fact that the layman cannot pay those who govern him without going through an entity that's insinuated itself through great deal of study and hard work is unnerving.  I don't want a people that separated from their government, especially regarding something affects them so directly.  This can only be done through an exceedingly simple tax code, far from what we have now where only one who devotes his life to understanding the tax code or is wealthy enough to hire someone who does will get the benefits of it.

This country was founded on many things, but one of them was "no taxation without representation."  We believed so strongly that we deserved a say in how and why governments take money from us that we fought for that right.  Has the American spirit dwindled to a point where we accept taxes as an inevitability, overseen by some arcane power that we can only glimpse through the eyes of a few initiated elite among us?

What is Marriage?

I'm getting married soon, and that could mean something different to every person I tell that too.  I recently discussed with a co-worker about how difficult it is to establish a mutual understanding of what marriage means, so in the spirit of creating a better understanding of what I'll be doing I want to express what marriage means to me, as well as putting forth some general ideas that may be useful to anyone in understanding the concept of marriage.

Often marriage is is equated with lifelong commitment, but I think there's a better way to understand marriage.  Marriage is a commitment that  goes beyond the couple.  It's when two people make a commitment not only to one another but to a third party.  The details of who or what that third party is define the greater details of what marriage means to them.

If we marry with a government, it largely means they now have an array of legal rights regarding each other, and that they cannot fully dissolve their relationship without consent returning to a representative of the government.  Often the third party will often be God or a church, which introduces a spiritual element into the relationship.  This lends important understanding about marriage because it goes beyond being committed to one another.

Yes, many people are committed and plan to spend their whole lives together without ever needing to get married.  That's one choice, people can also choose to express this through marriage.  I feel that marriage is an option we employ when we feel the need to elevate our relationship above the two (or sometimes more) people in it.  Marriage is a declaration that we are not only committing ourselves to another, but to the betterment of our society, our people, or our God.

I'm getting married because I want the benefits granted by government and God.  I want to be with my wife for this life and the next.  I want to be recognized as one who cares for her and has entwined his life with hers, in finances, health, and the search for spiritual salvation and perfection.  I want her to know I won't leave her, and have the guarantee not only of my words but a contract with greater powers to which I will have to go if I ever did.  I want to work with her to better ourselves and the world in which we live.

Waiting

"Patience is a virtue," everyone says.  Often one hears a response along the lines, "Yes, but it's one I don't have."  I feel like this response misses the mark terribly and perpetuates the foolhardy idea that our virtues (or vices, often) are just something we are born with and will end up living life according to.  It undermines the idea that we humans are free and have the power to act for ourselves, debasing man to nothing more than an animal, or even the earth, water, air, or other elements of nature.  Since, as you may have noticed, the author finds this idea somewhat repugnant he will often retort with something like, "And we must learn to develop virtues."

Patience is, or at least is often perceived to be, how we handle waiting.  Do we sit quietly, do we fidget, do we pace up and down?  There has been an odd change recently that has caused us to think many things should happen instantaneously.  When I worked as a camp counselor the employee use computers were very obsolete and of course ran quite slowly.  Rather than disparaging the frustrating situation I came to refer to these as the "Zen computers."  I try to take this sort of attitude toward a lot of waiting; standing in a line, downloading a webpage, or standing at the bus stop can be great opportunities to think and observe our thinking.

Often waiting frustrates us because we feel such a drive to get our next task finished or such desire to have whatever we'll get after the wait.  I've had to adjust lately to some of these feelings myself.  I recently changed from a company that would give me a weekly paycheck to one that pays every two weeks.  This means I have to wait longer when I want to make a payment on my student loans, credit card, rent, cable bill, or anything else.  I've had to do slightly more planning ahead, but the bigger deal is becoming comfortable with things the way they are until I have the resources to change them.  I think this is the greater principle here.  Often we get frustrated, aggravated, or just plain angry when we're forced to wait because it's such a clear signal that there's something we can't control.  Facing our limitations is always humbling, and many don't wish to be humbled.

Lately I've also been waiting to get married.  This has been one of the most interesting experiences I've had in learning to wait.  I feel such deep desire toward my beloved as well as a certain sense that I won't be taking the next step in my life until the wedding day has come.  I'm learning a lot when about enjoying the experiences I'm having even while wanting so much more.  I think this is what we're really seeking when we talk about learning delayed gratification.

It's easy to view waiting as something onerous and obnoxious.  It's common to equate a wait with a difficulty.  I think waiting is a great way to learn, especially about ourselves.  Know thyself, the saying goes, and while doing things is important we also need to take time to get to know ourselves in a more intimate setting.  Waiting is a great way to do that.