At 03:11 5/11/97 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
At 02:12 AM 5/11/97 -0700, David Wagner wrote:
(Note: contents of calls are protected by law, but traffic analysis specifically is allowed, far as I can tell.)
Correct. There is no (federal) constitutionally protected privacy interest in traffic-analysis data about phone calls, because (so the argument goes) that data is voluntarily disclosed to a third party (the phone company).
That argument is bullshit, however. Getting technical about it, you "disclose" your voice to the phone company so that it can digitize it and send it to its destination. If that argument were valid, voice would be unprotected as well. Chances are excellent that this odd position is a holdover from a time (1920's) when many if not most telephone calls were manually switched, and you had to tell the (human) operator the number you wanted to call. That act of telling was probably considered "disclosure." However, logically the adoption of a system of automatic switching (which doesn't require recording the number called; for many decades such recording wasn't even done because it was economically impractical except for charged LD) would eliminate the presumption that the number was already "disclosed." Since phone company operations subsequent to call takedown do not require the recording of destination numbers, any more than they need to record voice, the constitutional treatment of these two pieces of information should be identical. In any case, constitutional rights should not depend on (or be limited by) the state of technology 70 years ago. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com