NSA memo pushed to 'rethink' 4th Amendment

[cascadiance]

21. Fully agree that we find some mechanism for the customer to have legal claims...

... of how their private data is used when housed on external services. And it shouldn't be tweaked by some buried language in a book-long TOS contract that so many of us sign today without looking at it pragmatically, unless we have a day to do so.

I think that is why I would advocate that we need a technical task force that perhaps reports directly to citizens themselves, or at least not "owned" by government entities that are also "owned" by corporate interests now. Such a task force would be tasked with how to practically put together a set of rules with teeth in them, but are such so that they don't get in the way of the online world working effectively and in a safe manner. That's a tough question.

I as an engineer understand that, where I might have access to things I might need to fix data problems, etc., but at the same time I don't want to look at people's private information either and respect people's privacy as a fundamental priority. It's hard to make a good set of general rules that apply to all cases. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and hopefully come up with something that works well. The fundamental problem is that we haven't been "trying" hard enough for so long, some of that by design by the PTB that don't want restrictions on their abilities to have access to this information. If that equation can be dealt with, then perhaps we can get some people at least look at working on the right solutions that work for all of us.