General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Here's What Happens When Someone Wants To Use YOUR "PUBLIC" INFO To INTIMIDATE YOU. [View all]intaglio
(8,170 posts)What is written on an envelope or is in meta is public because everybody can see it
1) Get this through your skull - it has, repeat has, to be public or else your mail, your phones and your internet would not work.
2) It has to be capable of being seen, not just by your mailman or your service provider but by all of the persons or computers it passes
3) Not only that but the envelope or meta describes what, legally, can be publicly scrutenised.
Conduct a thought experiment, what would happen if you wrote all of your most embarrassing secrets on sheet of paper and posted the unsealed and unfolded sheet through the post? Do you honestly believe that any postal worker or member of the public could be prosecuted for reading that unsolicited confession? Any court would throw that case out and laugh at you for being so ignorant because you would have no reasonable expectation of privacy from such an act. Envelopes and meta circumscribe what a postman, or member of the public, who glimpses the document is allowed to see without a warrant.
I the same way, when you subscribe to a magazine and receive hard copy do you really believe that no-one can see that magazine being delivered, or seeing the logo of that publication on the covering?
Do you really think that anyone visiting sites called, for example, "Jihadi Tips" or "Evil Abortionist Addresses" or ringing helplines with those names should not have the contents of such visits and calls examined in exactly the same way that letters to similar publications would be examined? The only real difference is that the "nasty evil" Government (in which you are inciting so much hatred) is looking at transcripts of internet transactions and logs of calls to document visits to such nauseous sites rather than at envelopes the postal service
Do you think that payments you make online to Uncle Robert in Bolivia should not be looked at in the same way that bulky envelopes addressed to Uruzgan Poppy Co-operative in Afghanistan should be examined?
Like so many others you are an outrage junkie who cannot see the difference between what is - and has to be - public and what you think should be obscured.