> 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?
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.