[billspreston]

How's the Bill of Rights working out for you? Far as I can tell, the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about.

What makes you think governments are going to respect a Bill of Rights for the virtual world when they don't even respect the one for the physical world!

[sdrothrock]

A Bill of Anything won't do much without some enforcement... and enforcement in America suffers from a lot of problems including basic interpretation.

Since Berners-Lee's suggestion isn't backed by any political body at all (powerful or not), it seems like a completely useless suggestion.

Even if it were backed by a powerful political body, like, say... the US or the EU, I'm not sure how comforted I would be.

Edit: It's been a while since I've taken Latin, but "Magna Carta" essentially means "Big/Great Paper," so the tongue-in-cheek modern equivalent might be something like "Yotta Byte."

[TDL]

Creating a moral high ground isn't necessarily a "useless suggestion." Nation-states require the moral acquiescence of it's citizens. Something that is given tacitly can be taken away rather violently.

[aylons]

Magna Carta is more akin to "The Main Letter".

[tokenadult]

The Bill of Rights is working just fine for me, thanks. Implementation is imperfect, because the human beings who are tasked with implementing it are all imperfect, but I have lived elsewhere, and I can tell the different between having the Bill of Rights and lacking it. A culture of "rule by law rather than rule by men" is important to make laws meaningful, but where I live we largely have that culture. I speak and write freely, my personal possessions are safe from arbitrary seizure, and when I want a jury trial, I can get a jury trial. Many people around the world enjoy none of these freedoms.

[chimeracoder]

> The Bill of Rights is working just fine for me, thanks.

First, saying "things are worse in [some] other places that do not have a Bill of Rights" does not negate OP's point that "Far as I can tell, the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about [in the US]".

> I speak and write freely, my personal possessions are safe from arbitrary seizure, and when I want a jury trial, I can get a jury trial. Many people around the world enjoy none of these freedoms.

You may enjoy those freedoms. But not all US citizens enjoy these freedoms.

On paper the Bill of Rights protects all US citizens, and all US citizens equally. In practice, that is very much not the case. As the saying goes, freedom of speech exists to protect those whose words critics want to silence, not those whose uncontroversial words have no critics. More broadly, the litmus test for the Bill of Rights is not whether your freedoms are being upheld, but whether all others' freedoms are being upheld.

It's not enough to simply say that "the implementation is imperfect" when the exact ways in which the implementation is failing are the exact ways in which it needs to succeed.

[ucarion]

There is a difference between an unsatisfactory enforcement of the Constitution, and its outright failure. Saying that "the first, fourth and seventh have all been forgotten about" sounds like the latter, but the reality is closer to the former.

[atom-morgan]

After everything Greenwald and Snowden have given us you still believe this?

[logfromblammo]

Point of fact: the word "citizen" does not appear in any article of the Bill of Rights.

They are restrictions upon the US government. In practice, this usually protects US nationals to a greater extent than any other nationality, but in theory, it should protect everyone on the planet from just one (particularly powerful) government. People elsewhere have their own government nastiness to deal with; they don't need to worry about ours as well.

[logfromblammo]

Our testers are always telling us that "it works on my machine" is not sufficient cause to close a bug as not reproducible.

So the Bill of Rights works for you. Good job! Your environment is configured correctly.

But it has to work for everybody. You really need to look in to what is happening to the people in your municipality, county, state, and country that have less money and political power than you have.

What I see is that poorer people are being imprisoned at an ever-increasing rate, and that richer people are getting away with murder, sometimes literally. What I am seeing is less "rule by law" than "rule by money". It isn't quite "rule by men", but it certainly isn't equal justice for all.

[grey-area]

The Magna Carta was imposed on king John by his nobles, and went from being a statement of grievances more honoured in the exception to the law of the land. I think it's quite a good analogy for what needs to happen in the internet domain.

[saraid216]

Pretty sure Berners-Lee isn't under the jurisdiction of the Bill of Rights.

[arethuza]

I suspect he is in he US a fair bit - does the US Bill of Rights only apply to US citizens in the US?

Even so, we have our own Bill of Rights across on this side of the pond:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

[bmelton]

> does the US Bill of Rights only apply to US citizens in the US?

There's some conflict on that, but there's precedent that the fourth applies to all citizens and whomever happens to be on US Soil, whether they're a citizen or not.

[logfromblammo]

Technically, much of the Bill of Rights applies to the federal government and all subordinate governments. If they are not allowed to do something, period, it hardly matters if the person they are doing it to is in a particular place or has a particular attribute.

Politicians, realizing that only the citizens may vote, may exempt those folks from their otherwise unconstitutional activities, because others have no effective means to seek redress. My reading of the 4th is that it is a restriction on the conduct of the government, such that it applies to every natural person on Earth.

It may well be that the Supreme Court has not ruled this way because it is overwhelmingly staffed by politically-connected lawyers, rather than linguists and logicians.

The government is not allowed to search anyone, anywhere, without a specific purpose. Drawing a dividing line between foreign and domestic spying is a distraction from the notion that Uncle Sam is breaking the law when he listens in to Joe Terrorist's phone calls from halfway across the world to about 45% of the way around via dragnets and data mining.

We are willing to tolerate some degree of law-breaking when it is clearly in our own interest to do so, but it has gone well beyond that by now. Someone's wrist out there is just aching for a good, light slap.

[bmelton]

Completely agreed. The fourth has the more clear-cut 'bright-line' demarcation point, as you said, "the government may not randomly search people", whomever those persons are.

Clearly though, not all rights in the bill of rights can be held to the same standard... for instance, voting rights should not as clearly be extended to non-citizens who just happen to be on American soil, but one's right to life had very well ought to be.