RangerDave wrote:
It's not a technical question. What matters is the service that is being provided, not the mechanical means by which it occurs.
The mechanical means matter immensely. They dictate what is realistic and reasonable.
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For the last 100 years (longer with the mails), society has expected and required third-parties who are in the business of transmitting otherwise private communications between people to maintain that privacy.
You are begging the question. I am saying that not all internet communications are private communications. It is irrelevant what the requirements of private communications are; I haven't contested that in those instances that specifically ARE private that these requirements should be ignored. That isn't in question.
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We required it of mail carriers. We required it of telegraph operators. We required it of phone companies. It is not a stretch to now require it of ISPs and other online service providers.
Yes it is. The nature of what you are doing on the internet is not always the same as sending a letter, phone call, or telegram. Those are distinct communications between a sender and a receiver. There is a "session" of sorts (I am not referring to the OSI session layer here, just using it as a general term), such as the call or the telegram sending, or the sending of the letter, and a communication that exists distinctly within it.
Internet communications are not like that. Examination of the communicated information - the information inside the letter or call or telegram - is necessary for the internet to perform its functions in many cases. I already pointed this out - if you search for "pizza", that search term is inside a frame, or frames, that is encapsulated by headers and a trailer. That information has to be stripped off to process the packet and get you your search results. In order for the internet to be useful at all, what information you send has to be linked to who sent it. You don't, on the phone or the mail, send any sort of broadcast. You have no equivalent to a WAN or a LAN. In fact, it's not even
possible to publicly expose your information on those forms of communication in the way you can on the internet. There's no equivalent of Facebook where you can go expose every detail of your life and then wonder why people know how to exploit them. It simply
cannot be done, and this means the nature of the internet is different in ways that calling them "technical" or "mechanical" trivialize to the point of absurdity.
Furthermore, the entire idea of the internet is that it's not a distinct organization, but a collaborative worldwide effort. Your ISP is not Fedex. They're just an organization on the internet; they just do different stuff on the internet than you do.
Furthermore, the communications information required to get the actual frames from point A to point B is not secret or private at all, and claiming it is, is idiotic. There is no reason whatsoever this should be privileged or considered private, any more than the number on the front of your house is.
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In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is so directly consistent with past practice, that the burden of persuasion should be on those who oppose extending privacy requirements to ISPs, etc. to justify why this particular iteration of communication technology should be different than the prior ones.
You don't get to say that. You're the one making the claim that it's a private communication, and that it's similar. The burden necessarily falls on you. Just because it seems similar to lay people doesn't mean that it actually is similar, it means that lay people think it's similar because they don't think through all of the ramifications. The internet is, in very general terms, an amalgamation of a communications system and a public square or public place. It is foolish and inconsistent with reality to pretend one or the other ought to govern exclusively. (and even that analogy is probably not entirely accurate.)
On top of that, you've already been given some, and you haven't addressed them, except to repeat your assertion that it's the same as older forms of communication. I wish shuyung would tell us where we're **** up, because I don't expect any counter to really make any sense. I can open my Cisco book and understand that you're wrong, but I'm far from proficient enough to explain why in my own words.