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mindslight parent
How so? The comment I was responding to made no such distinction - it merely claimed "the government is not involved". In the US, "government" is generally taken to be anybody acting under the banner of nation/state authority (contrast with say the UK). So the government is most certainly involved here - adjudicating the case and issuing this retention order.

(for example, your own comment: the executive and judicial branches [of government])


freejazz
> How so? The comment I was responding to made no such distinction

Should I mention that water is wet every time I mention water? The executive is the executive, the judicial is the judicial. It's inherent in the discussion and pretending otherwise only for the benefit of furthering obtuse points that go nowhere serves the benefit of no one. So you either didn't know, and do now, or you're just cratering the discussion.

mindslight OP
I made an obtuse reply to an obtuse wrong assertion. You then baselessly claimed I didn't know about different branches of government. That second bit is what tends to crater conversations.

The distinction of the judiciary is most certainly relevant to the actual legal analysis here - the judiciary often reserves sweeping authoritarian powers for themselves, even when they do act to restrain the legislative/executive. So without even really analyzing the details, I am pretty sure that the law as written supports this action.

But the comment I was responding to wasn't making a larger more nuanced argument - rather it said that the government was not involved, defining away the actions of the judiciary as somehow not being governmental action, regardless of them being done with the authority of government.

The overall analysis is that if people are up in arms about this, it just reinforces the need for some actual privacy laws in this country - both to protect from corporations themselves abusing our data, and in this case to prevent the government from creating overly broad judicial orders that may only target specific companies but end up running roughshod over many individuals' rights.

(and just to be clear to avoid going off into the terminology weeds again: the definition of rights I'm using is the one of imagined natural rights, not merely what has been codified into law)

freejazz
So what? The poster was obviously referring to the executive so pretending like there was any ambiguity was ridiculous
mindslight OP
It's either ambiguous or a logical fallacy - the original concern is about government overreach in general, so it cannot be dismissed by focusing on the executive when it's obviously not the executive acting.

The commenter I responded to is an attorney who presumably just tried to cut out having to detail a longer argument based on the actual nuances that have been interpreted from the 4th amendment. Still, the argument bit off too much so in the interest of deeper analysis and rational discussion it seemed worth calling out.

freejazz
It's a legal dispute. The role the "government" plays in a legal dispute is very clear. You're being obnoxiously pedantic.
mindslight OP
The topic's entire complaint is of people not liking a government action, arrived at by government policy. You made a comment that the "government is not involved". Reading your other comments in this thread, it seems as if your point is to brush aside people's concerns as if they are nonsensical. But that simplistic statement is obviously false, because we are talking about a government order. My comments only seem pedantic because I've had to tediously spell out the details in response to your argumentative wriggling instead of you just accepting that your simplistic statement was wrong.

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