For some time I’ve been warning about a growing danger to the 4th amendment. The 4th amendment protects our “persons, houses, papers and effects” but police and some courts have been interpreting this to mean that our private records kept in the hands of 3rd parties — such as E-mail on an ISP or webmail server — are not protected because they are not papers and not in our houses. Or more to the point, that we do not have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” when we leave our private data in the hands of 3rd parties. They have been seizing E-mail without getting a warrant, using the lower standards of the Stored Communications Act.

Recently, we at the EFF got involved in a case challenging that, and argued in our amicus brief that this mail deserved full protection. We won a lower court round and are thrilled that today, the 6th circuit court of appeals has issued a ruling affirming the logic in our amicus and protecting E-mail. We hope and expect this to become the full law of the land, though for now, I might advise all E-mail service providers to move their servers to the 6th circuit (MI, OH, TN, KY) for full protection. It will save you money as you will be able to more simply deal with requests for customer E-mails.

You can read more details on the EFF page on Warshak v USA. Congrats to Kevin Bankston who did the work on the brief. (Amusingly, Google owes him a big debt today, and last week they were hassling him to provide a notarized driver’s license photo in order to get removed from their Street View!)

Continuing our discussion of the goals of voting systems, today I want to write about ballots that let you vote for more than one candidate in the same race. Many people have seen Preferential voting where you rank the candidates in order of how much you like them. This is used in Australia, and many private elections such as for the Hugo Awards. The most widely known preferential ballot is Single Transferable Vote and its cousin the instant-runoff. Many election theorists, however view these as the worst possible system. I prefer the Condorcet method with the modification that the cases where it fails, it is declared a tie, or a second type of election is used to break the tie. While it has been demonstrated that all preferential ballots have failure modes where they choose somebody that seems illogical based on the voters’ true desires, this does not have to be true when a tie is possible.

Multiple candidate votes would provide a dramatic improvement in the US — they are already used in many other places. They would have entirely eliminated the question of minor candidates “splitting” or spoiling the vote. There would have been no question in Florida of 2000, with Al Gore defeating George W. Bush (and at least by the popular vote, some feel that Bill Clinton would have lost to George Bush the elder, and there’s strong evidence the electoral margin would have at least been smaller.) This is in fact what prevents them from being used — there is always somebody in power who is going to conclude they would have lost has there been a multi-candidate ballot in place. Such people will fight it harder than advocates push it.

Small party candidates want it because it gives them a chance to be heard. Voters who like them can safely express that preference without fear of “spoiling” the race among the frontrunners. Given that, small candidates can eventually become frontrunners. In the 2 party system, as we’ve seen, any time a minor candidate like Ralph Nader gets popular enough that he might actually make a difference, the result is cries of “Ralph, don’t run” and a dropping of support from those who fear that problem.  read more »