Somebody offlist flipped my "internet rant generator." I will not stoop to respond to this snoopy, low-life, lapdog, cog-in-the-wheel directly, (and the high-and-mighty &^%$#!@ denied me the opportunity). So, please excuse me.... ---- "The issue in this case is clouded and concealed by the very discussion of it in legalistic terms. What the ancients knew as 'eavesdropping,' we now call 'electronic surveillance'; but to equate the two is to treat man's first gunpowder on the same level as the nuclear bomb. Electronic surveillance is the greatest leveler of human privacy ever known. How most forms of it can be held 'reasonable' within the Fourth Amendment is a mystery." --- Justice Douglas, dissenting, United States v. White, 401 US. 745 (1971). ---- A keystroke is not a mere physical action - it is a contemporaneous reflection of what is going on in your head. It is the contemporaneous interception of mental processes. I am not just "typing," I am thinking. A keystroke logger is akin to another recording device that is restricted for these very reasons: the polygraph. The ability to compose one's thoughts through writing, in private, should be an inviolable sanctuary. The law enforcement interest in garnering a passphrase to decrypt for the most heinous of criminal purposes pales in comparison to the importance of forever precluding the government from intruding on the genesis of human achievement at the sacred moment of its inception: taking your thoughts to the written word. As always, if they want it, they can come seize it, or intercept it. Interception and seizure always was about giving the government an opportunity to "get it." You took a risk by creating and having a document in your possession for a meaningful length of time - at least SOME length of time, or by "speaking your mind." Today, we press "SEND." You subjected your thoughts or words to a meaningful exposure. Now, because of a "passphrase," the government would have the act of merely putting a pen to paper to construct your thoughts require a similar act of courage. Yes, what you write is subject to seizure. Still, there is an important distinction. Surely, some drafts of constitutional provisions ended up in the embers of a fire, and we will never know the thoughts of the author that were penned and destroyed in private. To James Madison, a keystroke logger would look like a "tattletale quill." Had there been "tattletale quills" back then, I wouldn't be ranting about Scarfo, because we would have ever been afforded the protections the Constitution. The thoughts leading to the Fourth Amendment would have never seen parchment. Nor would have The Federalist Papers seen ink. The Crown would have interloped between the men and their manuscripts. Do you not realize the nature of this invasion! The government just turned a man's writing utensil into a wired government informant! How can a fair construction of the Fourth Amendment subject every American to question the trustworthiness of their pen? To have your pen as a contemporaneous witness against yourself? We must preserve as inviolate what little remains of that same sanctity between pen and paper that the Founders had when they framed their thoughts. The sanctity I speak of is that "sense of security" in knowing that you have the opportunity, no matter how brief or illusory, to consider your words before rendering them available to the senses of others. That is the wellspring of thought. Furthermore, are you not entitled to the same forgiving fire James Madison had, should you be able to fairly avail yourself of it? Think of the great thought that would never have been -- but for handy fires, and that _moment_ of sanctum when a man's pen hits his paper. At that moment, the historic* meanings of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments don't "run almost into each other," as in Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886), they collide. "Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate conveyances of the home. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions.... -- Justice Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928). ~Aimee *Emphasis on historic.