I think that you've taken this too far. We can't make blanket statements about peoples rights and expect them to be applicable in every situation.
In this case, a legal authority made the decision to interrupt a service for a small period of time in order to investigate a terrorist act that was disrupting the lives of thousands of people daily. If this was, say, a service that was providing medical assistance to elderly people, I don't think the same decision would have been made.
We can't make blanket statements about peoples rights and expect them to be applicable in every situation.
yes you can. that's exactly what a right is. a right is the right to do something even when it seems wrong. you don't need a right to do what seems right.
my favourite quote, ever:
At first blush it may be thought surprising that one should have a right to do that which one ought not. Is it not better to confine rights to that which it is right or at least permissible to do? But to say this is to misunderstand the nature of rights. One needs no right to be entitled to do the right thing. That it is right gives one all the title one needs. But one needs a right to be entitled to do that which one should not. It is an essential element of rights to action that they entitle one to do that which one should not. To say this is not, of course, to say that the purpose or justification of rights of action is to increase wrongdoing. Their purpose is to develop and protect the autonomy of the agent. They entitle him to choose for himself rightly or wrongly. But they cannot do that unless they entitle him to choose wrongly. - Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (p 266)
rights are very special things - they are used to protect a few essential freedoms that are so important they should be protected whatever else.
rights - real rights - are very powerful things. they're the last defense against tyranny. the absolute last thing you want is some dictator saying "well, times are hard, so you can't have free speech right now". that is why rights are absolute.
You're right that legal precedent doesn't take rights absolutely. For example, there's the "clear and present danger" test for speech rights.
However, weighing against such a determination is what the OP explained: any competent mail anonymizer is going to be a dead end in the investigation, so the chances of a payoff is small. I'd be curious to see the actual warrant, to see what the judge approved them to look for.
And on the other side of the coin, I expect that the rights of those using the anonymizer (as opposed to those of the company offering the service) were not weighed, because the FBI never inquired as to who would be affected (at least as far as I know).
Those users of the anonymizer are not directly injured, but are collateral damage. However, the same is true of you: you're neither the threat-maker nor the target of the threats, you're just inconvenienced by the actions that the victim was forced to make.
I agree... In one case you're talking about killing someone and taking their organs to give to others and in the other we're talking about disrupting someones email usage to prevent bomb detonation. Can we see the difference here? I still don't see any reason that I would not give up my private information on a server in order to protect our country and thousands of lives... looking up some counter arguments though. I can't think of any good ones off the top of my head.
>> I still don't see any reason that I would not give up my private information on a server in order to protect our country and thousands of lives.
In the case of the service disrupted, that private information on the server could be what's protecting other lives in a country where basic rights are being disputed in blood.
Right, but who is to say that the FBI would release that information into the wrong hands? If that is the case then it sounds like the problem is with the way confidential information is handled by our intelligence agencies.
I'm not talking about the actual content, just that they had made the service unavailable to people that might direly need them. If you're fighting for democratic rights in a country with severely restricted freedoms, it might not be a matter of just checking back for the service to be up, probably you'd have limited windows to of oportunity operate. You may just have missed the chance to warn a fellow activist in time to save his life, or your own.
In this case, a legal authority made the decision to interrupt a service for a small period of time in order to investigate a terrorist act that was disrupting the lives of thousands of people daily. If this was, say, a service that was providing medical assistance to elderly people, I don't think the same decision would have been made.