The post-PRISM internet

Posted Sep 20, 2013 17:56 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: The post-PRISM internet by epa
Parent article: The post-PRISM internet

surely part of the implicit 'terms of service' of the Internet as a whole is that if you send somebody an IP packet, that packet is labelled with your IP address, and they are allowed to record that address.

That seems pretty normal to me. I can think of lots of cases where a person is obviously sending information to someone and the recipient is not allowed to record it. For example, I believe there are laws in some places that a surveillance video has to be discarded after some short period (with various limitations on the subjects' ability to authorize keeping it longer). I know of laws that allow people to require credit cards or other ID documents as conditions of doing business, but do not allow them to record the numbers.

We do have to distinguish between the temporary recording implicit in using the information, like in the data structures that represent the TCP connection, and a log for future reference.