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The article above pretty succinctly explains why this definition does not work. Just because the Supreme Court has decided something doesn’t mean that all disagreements must stop, the Supreme Court has a tendency to weigh public opinion heavily into their decisions and this time it stinks bad.

1. The article is an opinion piece. It explains why the definition doesn’t work in the author’s mind, but it’s devoid of legal reasoning for why the NSA actions should get them in any trouble.

2. First you implied what was happening is unconstitutional, now you’re saying “just because the supreme court says something”… well until the Supreme Court says otherwise, that’s how it is. You can argue for a new ruling on the subject or a new law from Congress, but as of right now all case law points to the NSA doing nothing illegal or unconstitutional.

about 3 hours ago on President Obama defends NSA program in 'Charlie Rose' interview

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How exactly is phone metadata fundamentally different from pen registers?

about 3 hours ago on President Obama defends NSA program in 'Charlie Rose' interview

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Yes, that is how warrants work. But once again, there are many types of searches that have been ruled to not require warrants, including many of the searches that the NSA is performing. The 4th amendment does not apply well to third-party generated metadata.

about 3 hours ago on President Obama defends NSA program in 'Charlie Rose' interview

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I don’t believe that someone with “no motivation whatsoever” could be pushed into a terrorist act. It’s not something you wake up one morning and decide to do. The FBI is giving them the means to carry out an activity that they desire to do, the FBI isn’t implanting the desire.

about 8 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 2 replies

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A fellow Motorola fan? I thought I was the only one left.

I went OG Razr > Razr 2 > OG Droid > Droid Bionic. Waiting for the X. The Bionic has almost turned me against them.

about 8 hours ago on What's your phone/tablet/pc combo? What's next?

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I really want to get into iOS with an iPad mini, but I’m also looking for it to be cheaper. Hopefully there’s sales when they announce a new version.

about 8 hours ago on What's your phone/tablet/pc combo? What's next?

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Now
Phone: Droid Bionic
Tablet: HP Touchpad running Cyanogenmod
PC: HTPC box, nothing special
Laptop: Customized Toshiba M500 (a few years old), Core i5, 6GB RAM, 256GB SSD, dedicated NVIDIA graphics

Next
Phone: I am a Motorola fanboy so I am looking forward to the X phone
Tablet: Something in the 7" area, maybe an iPad mini (on sale?) or the next gen of Nexus 7
PC: Going to turn the HTPC into a gaming machine.
Laptop: I would like an ultrabook that’s a bit heftier than average in return for dedicated graphics

about 8 hours ago on What's your phone/tablet/pc combo? What's next?

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You said that Modred shot down his own argument by using the 4th Amendment to defend right to privacy on land, because his argument was that the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply the same to data. They are different, so nobody was shooting down their own argument.

about 9 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 2 replies 1 recommend

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Also, you largely brought this up by stating the public has no right to say what they feel should or shouldn’t be done about someone and a perceived crime.

The public can say whatever they want. What I essentially said was that anyone who argues against the prosecution of someone who has confessed to a crime is making a bad argument. The time for discussion of mitigating circumstances is in court, not before court.

That he committed a crime and the public feels it is irrelevant and worth ignoring due to what he revealed is what started this entire thing off.

The public doesn’t get to decide what crimes to ignore, at least not until a jury hears the details of the case.

about 9 hours ago on Edward Snowden says 'the truth is coming,' but when will we see the rest of his evidence?

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Comparing land to metadata doesn’t make for a good argument on your part.

about 9 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 reply 1 recommend

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Who owns the data?

Verizon does. This is the crux of the argument, and why the Contitutionality of the NSA’s actions is very much debatable. This paragraph from Wikipedia sums up my point quite well:

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the people’s right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures….” However, when applied to information stored online, the Fourth Amendment’s protections are potentially far weaker. In part, this is because the Fourth Amendment defines the “right to be secure” in spatial terms that do not directly apply to the “reasonable expectation of privacy” in an online context. In addition, society has not reached clear consensus over expectations of privacy in terms of more modern (and developing, future) forms of recorded and/or transmitted information.

about 9 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 recommend

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I don’t understand what’s wrong with that though. You can’t just convince an otherwise non-dangerous person to blow up a bomb. The act of giving tools to someone who would use them to cause harm if they could otherwise acquire them isn’t entrapment. There’s a possibility that the person would otherwise never be able to acquire the tools, but I think it’s more likely than not that they would just get them somewhere else if not for the undercover providers.

about 9 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 reply

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The entire point of the conversation was that Snowden should be prosecuted, and people who think he shouldn’t be are undermining our legal system. Yes, he can run away to a country without extradition and get away with it. But that’s not the point. The point is that he has admitted to committing a crime, and the fact that the leaks may have been “for the good of all of us” doesn’t make the crime go away until he has his day in court.

You’re nitpicking semantics. I should have said “You can’t disobey laws and not expect to be sought out for prosecution”.

about 9 hours ago on Edward Snowden says 'the truth is coming,' but when will we see the rest of his evidence? 1 reply

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You’re right. And in that enumeration of how the government can and can’t intrude on your personal life, there’s a lot of ambiguity, and there’s an argument to be made that the things the NSA is doing aren’t even unconstitutional. So the classic argument in these forums of “This is all unconstitutional because 4th amendment duh” doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

about 10 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 reply 2 recommends

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Yes that is what I mean to say and in fact is what I did say here:

Snowden also most definitely broke a completely different, and totally constitutional law, and he will be brought to court for it as well.

Obviously he can break laws, but the discussion is clearly about whether or not he should be prosecuted for it. And you can’t just disobey laws and not be prosecuted.

about 10 hours ago on Edward Snowden says 'the truth is coming,' but when will we see the rest of his evidence? 1 reply

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With the Family thing on xbox only one person can access the library at any given time. So if you are playing a game nobody else can play ANY of your games library.

That’s not the impression I got from Microsoft’s official statements. It seemed to me to be on a game-by-game basis. Each game belongs to you, but can be assigned as “loaned out” to one of your 10 special friends.

about 10 hours ago on Microsoft's Don Mattrick defends Xbox pricing: 'We're delivering thousands of dollars of value'

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It depends on how you define “violating privacy”. There’s plenty of types of searches you don’t need a warrant for, and clearly there are some types of data that you probably shouldn’t need a warrant for as well.

about 10 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 recommend

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And the argument can be made that by using some technological services, you’re giving up some of your implicit right to privacy. The real topic of debate is how much?

about 10 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 recommend

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84.7% of statistics are made up

about 11 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 reply 3 recommends

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Seriously? The government searching your private property is the same thing as them copying data generated by a private company through your use of their service? Come on now.

about 11 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 reply 3 recommends

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All the US court cases cited there don’t specifically reference the right to privacy in the Constitution, because it isn’t there. It’s more of a “spirit of the law” thing, and there are already several legal examples that allow some searches to occur without a warrant, where the public doesn’t have an “expectation of privacy”. What hasn’t been decided is where that “expectation of privacy” line is in technology.

about 11 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 reply 2 recommends

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The Constitution. The laws that state that you need a warrant in order to violate someone’s privacy

That is absolutely not what the Constitution says. The Constitution says that you need a warrant to conduct any search that would be unreasonable without probable cause. What is and isn’t “unreasonable” is up for debate. Even your personal ownership of things like phone metadata is up for debate, to be honest.

How utterly naive that you think that popular consent is given in backroom deals and briefings that are never revealed to the public.

Popular consent is given when a person is elected to represent the people. That’s a representative democracy. Your responsibility is to make sure your representative does their best to represent you. That’s how the system works.

about 11 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 reply 3 recommends

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I think more general details, like categories of data and what legal permission the government needs to access them. would be nice.

about 11 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 3 recommends

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We need publicly and legally defined levels of data and levels of suspicion needed. The government should make a table. On one column, types of data, ranging from Twitter history to phone metadata to location data to email contents to phone call recordings. The other column, the level of suspicion required to obtain each level of data.

about 11 hours ago on 'Over 50' terrorist plots were stopped by surveillance efforts, says NSA director 1 reply

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You’re right, but it’s not like the companies really had a choice. Corporations aren’t generally fond of participating in civil disobedience.

about 13 hours ago on Yahoo reveals some data request numbers, urges openness on secret FISA orders 1 reply

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Foreigners, and Americans that have any suspicious contact with foreigners. That applies to PRISM, but the phone metadata was being collected en masse. That’s my biggest frustration with this entire scandal – the phone metadata is likely the more egregious of the two, but PRISM is the bigger story because there’s a whistleblower behind it for the media to profile.

about 13 hours ago on Yahoo reveals some data request numbers, urges openness on secret FISA orders

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It’s not the job of the public to decide, The entire point of a prosecution and trial is to get all the facts out there and weigh the mitigating circumstances, and hear arguments from both sides. If you break a law, you’re supposed to go to trial. At the trial is where you explain why you shouldn’t be punished.

about 13 hours ago on Edward Snowden says 'the truth is coming,' but when will we see the rest of his evidence? 1 reply 2 recommends