CAMP WILLIAMS, Utah
(Reuters) - A $1.5 billion dollar National Security Agency data center under construction in Utah will be an important step in dealing with rising volumes of information in cyberspace, officials said on Thursday. "It's a very important step in protecting the interests of our country. Banking, financial interests, Internet and national security. This is an important step forward in all of those," U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch told Reuters at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Data Center.
WASHINGTON — A California police department did not violate the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it audited the text messages on a pager the city had issued him, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Thursday.
The decision represented only a preliminary attempt to define public employees’ Fourth Amendment rights in the digital era, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the court, took pains to say that the ruling was narrow and closely tied to the facts.
Still, the decision puts government employees on notice that electronic communications on devices provided to them may not be subject to the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches, as long as their employers have “a legitimate work-related purpose” in inspecting the communications.
Justice Kennedy said the court was uncomfortable fashioning comprehensive legal rules, given the pace of technological and cultural change.
“The court must proceed with care when considering the whole concept of privacy expectations in communications made on electronic equipment owned by a government employer,” Justice Kennedy wrote in a part of the opinion joined by every member of the court except Justice Antonin Scalia.
“Cell phone and text message communications are so pervasive that some persons may consider them to be essential means or necessary instruments for self-expression, even self-identification,”
Justice Kennedy went on. “On the other hand, the ubiquity of those devices has made them generally affordable, so one could counter that employees who need cell phones or similar devices for personal matters can purchase and pay for their own.”
The decision did not address the privacy rights of people employed by private companies.
ISPs argue that DPI is a valuable tool because it enables them to block illegal content flowing across the Internet, including copyrighted materials and contraband such as child pornography. One industry advocate -- National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow -- went so far as to argue that DPI is actually a pro-consumer technology, enabling ISPs to better filter viruses and other threatening content.
DPI gained notoriety last year when it was revealed that Comcast used the technique to throttle the flow of BitTorrent data across its networks. Other ISPs have suggested using DPI as a tool to prioritize traffic (perhaps based on a sliding fee scale), a technique that engineers argue is simply good network management.
Strong Privacy Concerns
But many worry that DPI can have profound privacy implications, since it enables ISPs to examine the content of all traffic, not merely that which is illegal or potentially damaging.
"DPI poses unique risks to individual privacy," said Leslie Harris, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "Moreover, once the technology is acquired for a legitimate purpose such as responding to network threats, it will be hard to draw the line at ever more intrusive uses as third parties approach the network operators with proposals to monetize Internet traffic and the government makes greater demands."
The Techno-Political-Digital-Age at barely a decade old is still very much in its early infancy. Like first time parents, global and national political policy makers are cautiously raising this baby and formulating their policies without the benefit similar experience. In the United States the depth of both the cultural impact and the massive financial scope of the ongoing Microsoft anti-trust case highlights how powerfully and deeply ingrained Techno-Political affairs have become in government, corporate, academic and personal operations, and how difficult the "correct" public policy can be to create. Since
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It is anybody’s guess as to whether the Globalized Digital Age of Techno-Politics will be a blessing or a curse, and for whom. Will democracies grow stronger and dictatorships weaker? Or will democracies --- especially in the light of terrorist threats---- grow more oppressive, using the technological tools of the political digital age to monitor citizen activity with greater precision than ever before possible.[v] Or maybe the Techno-Political Digital Age will just be a big sum zero impact with the global political and economic status quo unfazed. (In the next chapter of this paper we will explore these questions within the sphere of American politics.)
[i] ASSOCIATED PRESS. One effect of 9/11: Less privacy : New surveillance laws passed worldwide, report says.
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[iii] Ruwitch, John.
[iv] Reuters:
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[v] McCullagh, Declan. Will
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[vi] Kellner, Douglas. “Intellectuals, the New Public Spheres, and Techno-Politics”, Available at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/newDK/intell.htm
