[lesuorac]

> Is this all technically legal? Seems like it might be. Is this what the authors of the 4th amendment had in mind? Seems extremely unlikely.

you are not inconvenienced when the NSA buys data in the same way that you're inconvenienced when you have to feed/house a soldier.

While it's extremely unlike the authors of the 4th amendment had the internet & etc in mind this concept of selling things to the government surely was known to them and so the current implementation would be OK from their perspective.

A lot of the first 10 amendments are about protecting your physical property from the Government. 2nd - Guns, 3rd - House, 4th - Property, 8th - Money. The digital bits that Google and etc created (ex. metadata) are clearly neither in your procession nor your property. There is no amendment that protects letters you wrote but gave to somebody else nor recordings made by somebody else of your interaction with them.

[Joeri]

When you send someone a letter it is held by the post office, but it is definitely not allowed for the government to open those without a warrant, even if they do not inconvenience you. When you rent a house from a landlord they can’t turn around and sell warrantless access to that house to the government.

People have digital homes just as they have physical homes, and they have digital letters (mail, messages or chat) traveling to and from those digital homes. It is not unreasonable to expect all of that to be private against broad government surveillance.

[lesuorac]

Those examples are still different from reality.

You're decided to add a condition of "held by the post office" to the letter example. This is not at all what I wrote. Once the letter is delivered (as it was in my example) that recipient may give it to the Government without a warrant. The government may just not forcibly take it without a warrant.

Again, NSA isn't going into your digital home. They're going into Verizon's digital home and Verizon has invited them in there. Sure Verizon has information there that you gave them but just like if it had written Verizon physical letters it's not _your_ home its _Verizon's_ home.

It's fine to think of this like a loophole but gathering information and selling it really isn't some novelty that didn't exist in the 1700s.