Do you have a constructive point you would like to make with this distinction? You keep coming back to this, making it a point to insult me, but then don't really go anywhere with it.
This is Hacker News - we readily jump between levels of abstraction. I've acknowledged that the executive and judicial are separate branches are government, but my argument zooms out a level and treats them as both part of the larger government. Because when people feel their right to privacy is being violated by the government, it doesn't really depend on which branch is causing it!
It seems to me you want to hold to the distinction between the two so perhaps you can paint the action under discussion as if it's the result of something that could not just be changed? But obviously this capability of the judiciary could be restrained by Congress, the same as actions by the executive.
The point is that the conversation was perfectly parsable and your repeated misunderstanding brings nothing to it. I made that point several posts ago but for some reason you keep responding to me and I do not understand why.
> but my argument zooms out a level and treats them as both part of the larger government
Okay? I'm not going to argue against your obtuse misunderstanding or recharacterization of the problem. No one was referring to the government that way, so pretending like they were "for the sake of argument" furthers nothing.
I'm not misunderstanding. I told you what the problem was three comments back - if the word "government" is only referring to the executive branch, then dismissing the concern is a logical fallacy - the desire to be free from unreasonable searches applies to the judiciary as well as the executive. You just ignored the point in favor of calling me names instead.
> the desire to be free from unreasonable searches applies to the judiciary as well as the executive.
Discovery is not a search. There's no point to having this discussion when you keep pushing these obtuse misunderstandings of words that have particular meanings in these contexts. No less so when you insist you do understand that you are pushing different meanings of the words than what are being discussed.
It certainly seems like something is being searched through! We're right back to where we started, with you wanting to rule out people's legitimate concerns by defining terms narrowly and then asserting the concerns make no sense under your definitions. Sorry, communication does not work that way. I fed your trolling for far too long. Bye.
Search is a specific term with specific meaning that is not "anything that is getting searched through"
> We're right back to where we started, with you wanting to rule out people's legitimate concerns by defining terms narrowly and then asserting the concerns make no sense under your definitions.
It's not a legitimate concern. It is a misunderstanding based on ignorance. So funny how we got here again. Looking forward to your next post where you tell me actually you did understand, you were just trying to make a completely different point.
> Sorry, communication does not work that way
The law does. You don't go to court and call that a search. It's discovery. Search you need a warrant for because it's something the gov't does. The gov't here being the *executive branch* when it prosecutes crime.
The legal system does not have a monopoly on defining words or being a source of truth. And it is obvious that the legal system's reasoning lines up with the action in this case - otherwise the action wouldn't have happened! If you were merely clumsily making a point about positive behavior (vs normative behavior), that might be understandable. But then we get:
> It's not a legitimate concern
You are trying to define away discussion about normative behavior by insisting on the legal system's definitions, as if the legal system's definitions and laws cannot be changed. Either because you think it's an easy way to win the argument, or because the legal definitions have warped your brain so badly that you cannot think outside of that box. Either way, sorry - there are valid concerns here.
Putting the way I see it in legal terminology: the relationship between a user and a data storage provider should be much closer to that of a trustor/trustee than the current "anything goes" regime. Legally demanding a user's data, and especially the retention of a user's data, from/by a centralized service should require some indication that the specific user is doing something illegal themselves - not merely that the hosting provider in aggregate might be. They are not "business records", but rather personal records being entrusted to the custody of a business.
Specifically in this case, it should mean that in order to access saved chats and demand retention of deleted chats, the NYT (et al) should have to point to specific users they think may be infringing upon their copyrights, not merely launching a fishing expedition against all users.
And once again, since you seem to have a problem keeping this separate - I'm obviously talking about how things ought to be, not how the current laws shake out.
>The legal system does not have a monopoly on defining words or being a source of truth. And it is obvious that the legal system's reasoning lines up with the action in this case - otherwise the action wouldn't have happened! If you were merely clumsily making a point about positive behavior (vs normative behavior), that might be understandable. But then we get:
It doesn't. But if you are going to discuss it, you should be discussing the actual thing, not the other thing which is irrelevant. It's no different than in programming. If were discussing programming arrays and you kept butting into the conversation about how arrays can mean other things in english, it would behoove no one.
>You are trying to define away discussion about normative behavior by insisting on the legal system's definitions, as if the legal system's definitions and laws cannot be changed. Either because you think it's an easy way to win the argument, or because the legal definitions have warped your brain so badly that you cannot think outside of that box. Either way, sorry - there are valid concerns here.
I'm not defining anything away. I did not come up with the legal definition for search in the context of the 4th amendment. That's on over 100 years of jurisprudence, not me.
> Putting the way I see it in legal terminology:
Of no use to anyone at all. If we're describing programming, mathematics, any science... it's not relevant what my own definitions, or the other definitions not applicable to the context.
>And once again, since you seem to have a problem keeping this separate - I'm obviously talking about how things ought to be, not how the current laws shake out.
So? A search is still a search in legal terms if we are discussing what the 4th amendment protects. You can either join the discussion we were having, or not. It's your choice. I'm not stopping you from doing anything, all I did was point out that your contribution was so far off from being cognizable in this context that it is doing everyone a disservice. You're clearly intelligent and capable of talking about these things accurately, you just chose not to.
This is Hacker News - we readily jump between levels of abstraction. I've acknowledged that the executive and judicial are separate branches are government, but my argument zooms out a level and treats them as both part of the larger government. Because when people feel their right to privacy is being violated by the government, it doesn't really depend on which branch is causing it!
It seems to me you want to hold to the distinction between the two so perhaps you can paint the action under discussion as if it's the result of something that could not just be changed? But obviously this capability of the judiciary could be restrained by Congress, the same as actions by the executive.