When documents were analog, they were protected by government laws against unreasonable search and seizure. When they live in the cloud... the ground is shifting.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The increasing legal pressure against archives has created anxieties among researchers, librarians, and journalists. They cite the need to protect sources who wish to make a record for posterity; procuring documents and interviews from those sources will be difficult if the fruits are only one subpoena away from disclosure.
We live in a world of increasing dependence on electronic records and retrieval, unprecedented security and preservation concerns, and insufficient attention to civic and democratic education.
I think the Supreme Court has not yet caught up to an era in which one keeps one's papers in a cloud, not a castle.
Do you realize the FBI filing system from the '50s was much more secure? How could you have stolen that data? It was on notecards. Now someone with a thumb drive, or remotely, can take the equivalent of millions of those notecards.
The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it's their property, so to speak.
The government can still conduct clandestine searches of innocent people's private information such as library, medical, and financial records. This is wrong and should have been addressed in a true compromise.
There are, for example, exemptions in FOIA in which the government can withhold certain kinds of information, and the courts have recognized that there is certain documentation that do deserve protection, that certain privileges do apply and do deserve protection.
Sir, I see a lot of documents in my day-to-day business, and I can't tell you every document that I've seen. It may have passed across my desk. It may not have passed across my desk. I truthfully cannot answer that question, other than to say I don't remember.
To know we are being spied on by our own government, and to have someone else's government collaborating on that, to know that data storage is so cheap your information can be kept for years and used to create any kind of story, to me that's a grave attack on human rights.
Documents create a paper reality we call proof.