by darklighter3 on 8/9/13, 6:54 PM with 1 comments
by mpyne on 8/9/13, 7:32 PM
In the meantime the Fifth Amendment already should protect you against being compelled to incriminate yourself.
For the rest, for better or worse it's always been a government loophole to wait for you to tell a third-party something and then grab it. We used to have a government office that would read all (ALL) Western Union telegrams going abroad and coming within, for example.
Sometimes the government self-limits it's ability to do this (e.g. wiretapping phones... we've gone from days where phone conversations were conducted on a "party line" where all could listen it, to where no one may legally tap a phone line and even the government must obtain a warrant or court order).
The problem with self-limiting is that such limits can be just as easily undone (e.g. Patriot Act).
So perhaps a specific Amendment regarding privacy itself is warranted, because the Fourth Amendment doesn't speak to that itself, unless we wait for another activist Supreme Court decision ;)
But even in that case, I just don't see the NSA completely going out of the game as I don't think Americans will subject themselves to a "no foreign communications wiretaps" law, as that is something even the Germans seem to explicitly permit in their legal code.