Wednesday, April 7, 2010

As we progress through more of the course, I find that I generally swing more to the side of privacy protection and away from advances of government protections and enforcements.

My initial reaction to Scarfo, though, was one of exasperation towards the critics of the FBI; investigators had probable cause and were granted a warrant to search Scarfo’s computer. The KLS program shut down whenever the modem was active and so it did not intercept other wired communications and so it was as little privacy invading as technologically possible. It seems like KLS software generally meets all 4th amendment requirements for a search. And I agree with the judgment that, though KLS software goes through non-password -related information, it is a necessity to find the password - law enforcement has to go through lots of irrelevant information on a person or group in investigations to find incriminating evidence.

Though a password may represent a subjective expectation of privacy for Scarfo, I don’t feel that society’s judgment would overlap - if investigators can meet a high standard probable cause and the suspect is known to engage in numerous illegal activities in the physical world, as they found in the Scarfo case, I would think that a reasonable person would agree that the suspect has no reasonable privacy in the digital realm.

One place where I see an error in my views: keylogger software or full access to an entire managing server, which potentially holds information of thousands, if not millions, of people would be an unfair infringement of other people’s rights to privacy all in the name of hunting down information on one person.

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