Right Thinking From The Left Coast
"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Collusion in Espionage
by Lee

Here’s an interesting post of mine from 2006 regarding collusion between Yahoo! and the Chinese government, wherein the former provided personal information on its users surfing habits to the latter.

I wonder, those of you who are in favor of retroactive immunity for the telecoms, do you have any problem with this?  Because it seems to me that what our telecoms did was more or less identical to what Yahoo! did.  Here’s a quote from the article.

“The Li Zhi verdict shows that all Internet sector companies are pulled in to help when the police investigate a political dissident,” the press freedom organisation said.

“It is unacceptable that US firms should turn themselves into auxiliaries of a government that systematically tramples on the rights of Internet-users to freedom of expression,” it said.

Let’s rewrite that last sentence:  “It is unacceptable that US firms should turn themselves into auxiliaries of a government that systematically tramples on the rights of Internet-users to their Constitutional rights against warrantless unreasonable searches.”

So other than a lame “they did it for the wrong reasons, but we did it for the right reasons” argument, someone explain the substantive difference between what Yahoo! did and what our telecoms did.  In both cases the government asked for information and the companies gave it to the government. 

Posted by Lee on 06/28/08 at 03:08 AM in Politics, Law, & Economics  • (5) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Discuss this in the forums
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