I'm looking forward to seeing this play out in court. It really is pretty fascinating from a technical standpoint.
For example, you're looking at Gmail. And you're reading an email from your mistress and she's talking about your burning penis sickness. Then up pops some advertisement for some burning penis sickness cream. And you're like, fuck, that's kinda creepy, but gimme dat cream. You wonder... Hmmm, I don't know how cool it is that Google has my burning penis illness info or my mistress secret when they have so many employees. But fuck it, this cream is money it just saved my dick, so I'm cool with it.
Yeah, you signed up for Google and yeah, you agreed to some terms or whatever. But in those terms I don't see where Google has the right to call your wife and tell her of your activities. And even if it was fun to read about you, there's some tech in there to make the data anonymous and prevent workers from getting their jollies by reading about your exploits.
So the government needs to figure out if someone's going to blow up the white house. Or it happens, and they need to reconstruct how the hell it happened. And they're like, shit, wouldn't it be nice to collect a whole fuckload of info to track the internet age of terrorism. But they collect so much info, and so much of it is encrypted, gibberish, worthless, redundant etc., that on the whole it's pretty much useless. It's kind of like every black box on every airplane combined for every flight in the past 10 years. Did Steve bang a stewardess in the bathroom on flight #285 on June 10th 2007? Who the hell knows. Sure, every company and their mother is going to tell you that you can data mine the hell out of this giant blob of information and find out useful things, but unless you know what you're looking for, at best maybe you can identify trends. And maybe that has some value.
But where it's really valuable is when Mark does something really bad, and suddenly we're green light to investigate Mark, and his data lives somewhere and you can get at it. Maybe he sent an email to 3 more buddies that sounded suspicious. Maybe he told his family what he was up to. Maybe he has a following of psychos.
You could definitely argue this collection of essentially anonymous data - outside of the normal spy stuff of tapping foreign leader's phones or whatever - is legal as long as you use technology to protect the data prior to legal justification. I know this is the goal for some of these programs, and it's a big part of why I take issue with Snowden's attempt to paint a 1984 picture here. But in general it's just really interesting to see how outraged people are when all that's really changed is the context for your information being available to an entity, or the idea that the entity is a company instead of a government.
Anyway, should be a fun argument to make.
