For most of history, the way people communicated in private was to invite someone into their home and talk to them. That way still exists. All of the means of communication that were private in 1789 still are.
What you're asking for is to go another step: to be able to spew unencrypted bits all over the internet for any of hundreds of sysadmins and network engineers to see, then turn around and claim its private. You want to broadcast your location in real time to Google and ATT, who sells it to advertisers, then claim its private.
Maybe you should be able to do that. But its disingenuous to claim that what you're asking for is basic human private communication. What you're asking for is for the government to treat the internet as something other than what it is: a public network designed with almost no thought to keeping information private. At the most basic level, being a routed network with no built in encryption IP leaks your data out to every intermediate router on the way to the destination. SMTP passes your clear text email through multiple servers on the way to someone's inbox. Its a vast system designed with no thought to leaking your private data out into the world.
Maybe its because nobody teaches low level networking in school anymore, but I'm amazed at how many technologists indulge what is a technical fiction: that the two ends of a socket are connected by a private link.
For most of history, the way people communicated in private was to invite someone into their home and talk to them. That way still exists.
For most of history, the way people communicated at all was to speak to someone face to face. Luckily for us, modern technology provides other options. Surely you're not seriously suggesting that the principle of privacy and the arguments for why it is a good thing do not apply in any new context?
What you're asking for is to go another step: to be able to spew unencrypted bits all over the internet for any of hundreds of sysadmins and network engineers to see, then turn around and claim its private.
I don't see anyone here claiming that. It seems to me more often in this general debate people are asking for rather more reasonable things, like:
1. If you send data you intend to be private over the Internet, for example by encrypting it and sending it to a specific recipient, you shouldn't have to worry about crackers, communication services, or governments that don't have a good reason expending significant resources to infringe your privacy anyway.
2. If you choose to share some personal information with a modern service like Facebook, and choose to use the provided options to restrict who else gets to see it, you shouldn't log onto Facebook one day and find it's all been shared with other people anyway.
3. If you do want to visit someone to communicate in person the old-fashioned way, you shouldn't have to forfeit all of your normal rights and be subject to arbitrary invasions of your person and possessions just to travel.
None of these things matter if you live in a quiet countryside village and the only people you ever want to communicate with privately are your neighbours, but for most people in the western world, these activities are a normal part of modern life, and it is not unreasonable to expect governments and laws to protect everyone's privacy while they do them.
> Surely you're not seriously suggesting that the principle of privacy and the arguments for why it is a good thing do not apply in any new context?
No, I'm not suggesting that. What I'm suggesting is that you have to be honest about the argument you're making: we should take some of the principles that applied in the old context and apply it in the new context, based on sociological evidence about the parallels.
> I don't see anyone here claiming that.
But that's what it boils down to. You want to take something that is not, as a matter of fact, private, and have the government treat it as being private. You're begging the question, which is: can you reasonably expect internet communication to be private? At the purely technical level, there are good reasons for answering that question in the negative: how can you reasonably expect communication to be private when you expose it to so many people over a network that's totally not designed to keep it private? Surely mere intention can't be controlling.
When you send an e-mail in plain text over the internet, more people have access to the contents of that message than if you had posted it in a bulletin board in your office. That's the technical reality of how the internet works as a routed system.
Maybe it's the case that you want to accept that technical reality, but for sociological reasons nonetheless indulge the fiction that internet communication is indeed private. That's a perfectly fine argument to make. But you have to acknowledge that this is the argument you're making, not get outraged that the government doesn't take that premise for granted and doesn't automatically indulge that fiction.
You keep coming back to the idea of sending unencrypted data over the general Internet. Of course it's not realistic to secure that.
I am more concerned with privacy violations where people do make reasonable efforts to keep their data/communications private, for example using encryption, but where those methods are then thwarted through abnormal means: untrustworthy infrastructure providers who give up root certificates, organisations with data centres the size of a small town having both access to vast quantities of data and the power to brute-force the decryption, government agencies holding you at an airport for hours under anti-terrorism laws and demanding all your passwords or very unpleasant things that would be illegal under normal conditions will be done to you, that kind of thing. (The last example is not intended to be a political statement, just an obvious topical example of how powerful organisations can circumvent otherwise competent encryption and thus breach otherwise private communications.)
[Edited to add:] The other big issue, IMHO, is whether people using services might think them to be reasonably private when in fact they are not. There's not much value in debating points like the ones I made above if the reality is that when Joe sends Jane an e-mail he erroneously believes it is already reasonably secure and private. This is, of course, primarily an issue of education and in particular of "honesty in advertising", rather than a technical failure, but it's still a big part of the problem today: why would people look for better solutions to a problem they don't realise exists?
>That way still exists. All of the means of communication that were private in 1789 still are.
If you ignore cell phones and cars that constantly broadcast their positions, surveillance cameras everywhere, and that there are no sidewalks and no commons anymore, so where would you meet these people and how would you meet with them without the information being observed and stored?
The only possible goal of a system intended to flawlessly prevent 'terrorist' conspiracy is to create a system that flawlessly prevents unrecorded association and communication. The Stasi managed it with technology that was available in 1789.
This has nothing to do with computers, other than the terrible fact that they make doing this a lot cheaper.
What you're asking for is to go another step: to be able to spew unencrypted bits all over the internet for any of hundreds of sysadmins and network engineers to see, then turn around and claim its private. You want to broadcast your location in real time to Google and ATT, who sells it to advertisers, then claim its private.
Maybe you should be able to do that. But its disingenuous to claim that what you're asking for is basic human private communication. What you're asking for is for the government to treat the internet as something other than what it is: a public network designed with almost no thought to keeping information private. At the most basic level, being a routed network with no built in encryption IP leaks your data out to every intermediate router on the way to the destination. SMTP passes your clear text email through multiple servers on the way to someone's inbox. Its a vast system designed with no thought to leaking your private data out into the world.
Maybe its because nobody teaches low level networking in school anymore, but I'm amazed at how many technologists indulge what is a technical fiction: that the two ends of a socket are connected by a private link.