Those are the kinds of phrases we normally use to decide when the state can come and look at your otherwise-private activities.

Without a reasonable belief that someone is engaged in wrongdoing, the government has no basis observing them in a setting reasonably considered to be private.

What I think that means is that there can be surveillance cameras on public streets, but they can't zoom in to your living room.

In between is a lot of room for discussion. It's crazy, for example, to suggest that because your cell data flies through the air, you should expect the police are looking at and tracking your movements, even with no reason to suspect you've committed a crime. No one should be storing your e-mail, telephone, or web browsing information "just in case" it later turns out there's a legal justification to investigate you.

Facebook, et al. is a little different, in that you are putting yourself out there publicly. If you expressly put your personal information on a public site, people are going to look at it. But I don't think it's reasonable for law enforcement or spy agencies to be combing through everyone's Internet communications looking for possible signs of wrongdoing, or storing it all up for unspecified possible future use. That's begging for abuse of authority.

If, for example, some branch of the government doesn't like your opinions here on DU, and considers you a possible "radical," I don't think they have the right to try to find out if you look at weird porn, and store that information, in case someone later wants to embarrass you into silence. Different, though, if you advocate something overtly criminal like violence or overthrowing the government by force or what have you.

There's a difference between it being technologically possible to find out everything about everyone, and the right to go and do that for any purpose outside of a legally sufficient criminal investigation.

The 4th Amendment is being violated with impunity. We are only being led to believe it has been made obsolete.

People are confusing public and private information. Our E-mails and phone conversations are private communications, as is the meta data needed to route that E-mail or phone call to the correct receive point. The meta data is needed for the system to work. The government has no right at all to access our phone calls or E-mails, without a proper warrant and probable cause. The same goes for the meta data involved, it is private information belonging to the phone company or Internet provider(s). We are only being told it is not private, so a renegade government agency can hoover it up and store it with impunity, for later searching.

Just because it is on the Internet does not mean it is not private. Just ask the guy who read Sarah Palin's E-mails. Just because you possess something you gathered from the Internet, does not mean it is yours to do with as you please.

Sid

I'm not naive enough to believe no one at the NSA has abused their powers, but I'm also not naive enough to believe that George Stevens, father of three, from Head of Hollow, Ohio, who works 40 hours a week, watches a bit of Netflix, and calls his siblings on birthdays, anniversaries and holidays is being monitored 24/7 by the NSA.

That's the problem I have with these stories. They try way too hard to create a faux solidarity among average Americans living average lives that are not stirring up all kinds of trouble and associating with dangerous people. It's downright immoral to scare these people into thinking the NSA is interested in them when that's just not the case.

so whenever George pops up for any reason anywhere, they have anything they want about George since the '90s.

with a reasonable expectation of privacy and things you post publicly. For example, Your Facebook postings, if you have selected to make them only visible to friends or friends of friends, are semi-private. You have undertaken to release that information to only a selected group of people. It's a violation of your privacy for someone who is not part of that group to go and try to see that information.

On the other hand, if you have a public blog, or post things on places like DU, where whatever you post is available to anyone, then you should have no expectation of privacy, and anyone is free to poke around with Google and other means to search for it. And anyone means anyone, including the government, if they choose to do so.

In other cases, it's less clear. Most people on DU, for example use screen names, rather than their real name. That, however, isn't a guarantee of privacy, as many have discovered. For example, I have links in my signature line that lead to blogs of mine. If someone clicks those links, they will find out who I am in real life. I know that, and have given up any idea that I am anonymous.

In other cases, people use the same screen name on several websites, so a search of a screen name can lead to additional information. Of course, most screen names aren't that individual, so people digging around may be sent on a wild goose chase. However, anyone with a bit of imagination and some search skills can soon figure out who's who, if they're determined to do that.

Privacy is a fleeting thing, though, mostly. It can be maintained, but that has to be a deliberate thing. If you aren't careful, you leave tracks all over the place that can be followed. Should people be following those tracks? Well, it's not a polite thing to do, but you've left the openings there, and not everyone is polite.

Mostly, failures of privacy come from sloppiness. People often don't think about what they're doing and inadvertently leave trails to their real identities all over the place. I'm not going to detail those, but there are many, including links to personal websites, photo dumps, and other such things.

The real question, in my opinion, is why anyone would want to go digging around in the first place. I don't understand that kind of sleuthing, unless there's a valid reason for it. Is the government digging around to see who you are? Why? I doubt that anyone I have even seen on DU, for example, is of any interest whatever to the government. So, odds are that they're not looking you up, even though they could if they wanted to.

Who is looking at you and what you do? Google is. Yahoo is. Corporations are. They all want to know what interests you, so they can sell you some crap or sell your identity so others can try to sell you crap. So, they're following you all over the place. Criminals, too, want to know about you. They'd like to have your social security number and your birthdate, since they can do things with those to steal the crap from you.

The government? Not really. With the exception of the very busy alphabet agencies, they don't really have the talent to do so, and those alphabet agencies have much bigger fish to catch than those of us here on DU. They don't care about you, really. The IRS cares, but they already have a system that can find out all of your financial dealings, so they don't need to dig around your internet activities.

So, who is it that you think is prying into your life? It's not the ones you're worried about who are doing that. It's a whole group of others who are interested in you. And they're finding everything they need already as you meander through the tubes.

If you want privacy, be private. If you don't want to be private, then you probably have very little privacy, really. It's an artifact of our connected world, and there's probably no going back.

Anyone can access public information.