> Otherwise how come that would even be legal to run?
Why wouldn’t it be? I was under the impression that what isn’t forbidden by law was legal by default. AFAIK, running a VPN platform isn’t illegal.
> If someone commits a crime and government cannot find evidence, because Apple gives shielding, then isn't that making them hypothetically an accomplice?
I hate this argument. It’s lazy and can be used to accuse anybody in any context, and shut down discussions that we should be having. By that standard we are all accomplices for some crimes.
>I was under the impression that what isn’t forbidden by law was legal by default.
Even beyond that, personal privacy from the government is enshrined in the 4th amendment. Just because there was some executive actions and illegal laws made does not mean the 4th amendment suddenly disappears. No person or entity has the right to dragnet all communications.
I'm doing the opposite. Saying that the fed is actively engaging in illegal search and seizure is not ignoring the whistleblowers that brought the scope of the issue to light, it's acknowledging the issue.
The point is that the Constitution is largely meaningless, feel-good fluffery that has no actual bearing on which of our so-called rights are actually available to us.
It's an aspirational document in a largely lawless land, more a historical oddity than the supreme anything. If you wait for legislators and law enforcement to fix personal privacy, you've already lost... the US law enforcement culture is actively hostile towards individual rights because it makes their jobs harder. The only real difference to, say, China, is that we like to pretend otherwise. But the reality in the ground is that nobody on the grid has had meaningful privacy for decades now.
>The point is that the Constitution is largely meaningless, feel-good fluffery that has no actual bearing on which of our so-called rights are actually available to us.
IANAL but this sounds fundamentally wrong in every way I interpret it. The Constitution is a set of laws that cannot be contradicted by any other law, executive action, or judicial action, with the exception of an amendment.
> No person or entity has the right to dragnet all communications.
Indeed. And the fact that this is not recognised as a fundamental human right is a serious limitation of the charter and universal declaration. And yet, it comes up regularly.
Why wouldn’t it be? I was under the impression that what isn’t forbidden by law was legal by default. AFAIK, running a VPN platform isn’t illegal.
> If someone commits a crime and government cannot find evidence, because Apple gives shielding, then isn't that making them hypothetically an accomplice?
I hate this argument. It’s lazy and can be used to accuse anybody in any context, and shut down discussions that we should be having. By that standard we are all accomplices for some crimes.