Ms. Yin, I am so tired of posts with links! I really prefer not to check out footnotes, it's so tedious but then, again, if one read Willy Ley's History of Rocketry, 2nd Edition, one would never learn anything about Dr. Tsien, who invented control fins it seems from the footnotes. He was expunged from the body of the text of the 1st Edition. Your comment itself is well taken.

On Bankston, I also saw him on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and, I have to say, he is the best speaker to represent the EFF so far. It was getting a little weird watching ancient hippies (much like myself, so don't take offense, guys) making a case that impacted so largely a youth market. Now that the market is so much more mainstream, Bankston makes a really credible set of arguments in a very persuasive manner. He's a keeper!

Thanks to Kevin Bankston for such a clear and concise discussion of the flaws in ECPA.

It's something the organization I've been working with has been researching as a part of our work, trying to figure out what privacy rights individuals have if they donate data to a public datatrust intended to provide data to researchers and policy-makers.

We wonder though if we need to be defining standards around acceptable levels of privacy intrusion in terms of the size and scale of the data-mining that's being done.

Meaning, unlike search and seizure of physical property, you can easily data-mine hundreds of thousands of user accounts with less effort than it might take to read through a single paper file or search a single home.

How do we reconcile such a significant difference with our old notions of due process which did not and could not have foreseen the world "going digital"?

(Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that we limit the size of the datasets being mined, that would defeat the purpose of data-mining. Rather, I'm talking about process guidelines for how to go about doing low-(privacy) impact data-mining.)

http://commondataproject.org
http://bit.ly/boBFDD