In article ,
Fred J. McCall wrote:
:Our phone records. The courts have been pretty clear that the police
:need a warrant to get a record of someone's phone calls in a criminal
:investigation. The NSA records trawl represents a pretty clear violation
f the FISA rules for national security searches.

Got any cites? Seems to me that the records of who you called don't
belong to you.

Uh, so? That doesn't mean they are public information. The people who do
own them can still have a legal obligation to keep them confidential, and
to release them only in well-defined circumstances. Property rights are
not the only form of rights involved.

WHAT was said would seem to be covered, but marketers
can get hold of a lot more intimate things.

Sometimes, and sometimes not. That doesn't mean they -- or random
government agencies -- are entitled to get *this* particular type of
information.

Moreover, the two cases are not parallel. The government is subject to
*more* restrictions, not fewer, than private enterprise, precisely because
its ability to ruin your life is greater. It's quite legal for your
employer to monitor conversations on your office phone... but a cop who
does it without a warrant is in big trouble if he's found out. (And if he
asks your employer to, and the employer does, *both* are in big trouble --
acting at his request makes the employer an "agent of the government" and
subject to the same rules.)

How is a listing of who you've called any different than a record of
what web sites you've visited?

Are you asking why it *is*, or why it *ought* to be?

It *is* because laws concerning phone eavesdropping are well established,
while the net is still largely in legal no-man's-land. While it might
seem reasonable that analogous rules should apply, that is not yet an
established legal principle. And if and when it becomes one, the result
is likely to be more privacy for the net, not less privacy for phones.
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