Keep Out

by John Constantine

Abuse of power comes as no surprise
    - Unknown

There's a recent article in the New York Times about redefining the privacy expectations employees have at work.  Naturally, I agree 100 percent with Judge James M. Rosenbaum.  I have a well developed weasel filter and I didn't detect a huge amount in the report on his thought process.

The current corporate position is this: 

A quote from the NY Times article from judge Rosenbaum sums up my reaction to this logic:

Judge Rosenbaum said that he is surprised that there has been such an "uncritical acceptance" of the proposition that because a company owns the computer they have a right to all its contents. "If that's true, then why can't a company come into your house and get everything you ever wrote on a company pad with a company pencil," he said. "It's the same logic."

"I think we are just following these things like a bunch of lemmings right now," he said. "I'm just trying to suggest other ways of thinking. I'm not looking to stimulate new lawsuits. We have plenty of those in the store."

Well, duh.

So I'm not going to ramble on about that.  I think this whole issue will painfully wind it's way through the courts and if we're lucky we'll get a reasonable balance struck.  Heck, law is mutable, and we should hope that the system works.

Which is why I support trial lawyers.  Well, I don't personally give them a lot of money, thank god.  But corporate attorneys, and a few defense attorneys over the years have taught me that a lawyer seems to be one of those necessary evils.

Which is why republicans hate them, of course.  Sure, the USA is the most litigant society on earth.  Democracy's aren't pretty, and you can't make law without a lawyer.

What I'm going to ramble on about is the mentality that gives rise to the thought process that produces such wonderful logic.

The belief is a little more complex than one might initially think.  Usual analysis by those who reside in the left wing of politics yields the belief that the problem is that they are fascists, pure and simple. 

But we're all fascists, at least at heart.  There is the deep rooted idea that whatever you nominally "own" you have the unbridled "right" to do whatever the heck you want with it.

Of course, there are vast tracts of law that deals with what "rights" you have vis-à-vis what you "own".

So the whole idea of ownership is something that every great philosophy has struggled with.  Being a pragmatist, I accept that there is something called ownership that is a useful concept in economics.

But the question Judge James M. Rosenbaum raises is "Does the ownership of a pen and paper transitively give you ownership over what the person, using this pen and paper, produces".

Anyone who makes their living through intellectual property has been dealing with this question daily.  Now, through the magic of computer infestation in almost every segment of the economy, the "rest" of you working stiffs have to now deal with it.

Yep, that even means his nibs.  You, your mom, even that crazy uncle in Idaho.  Everyone is now generating terabytes of corporate owned intellectual property.

So now we can see where the current thinking of corporate law, with respect to email snooping, file trolling and keystroke monitoring, comes from.

And it shouldn't be surprising.  A while ago there was a furor raised by the FBI regarding their ability to monitor or "tap" electronic communication.

The argument used to justify this is slightly different, but when examined it is in fact isomorphic.

But the thing that surprises me is how everyone reacts to this.  Everyone just assumes that the main rights to protect are the corporations.  I know, I'm naive.

And I do agree.  Corporations have rights that need to be protected.

I just don't think that the first instinct should be to assume that they have the fascist power to do whatever they want.  I mean, corporations are composed of people, and we don't think it's a good idea to give fascist power to do whatever they want.

Misuse of corporate resources (or FBI resources, for that matter) are a daily occurrence.

And trolling through emails and files is something highly likely to be abused.

So can't the corporate world be a little more with it?  I mean, this stuff is obvious even to sub-troglodyte raw "IP" miners like myself.

It's just kind of scary to see how those nominally in charge of making this world "work" react sometimes.