Olivia Solon, Guardian; 

With the latest WikiLeaks revelations about the CIA – is privacy really dead?

"In the week that WikiLeaks revealed the CIA and MI5 have an armoury of surveillance tools that can spy on people through their smart TVs, cars and cellphones, the FBI director, James Comey, has said that Americans should not have expectations of “absolute privacy”.

“There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America: there is no place outside of judicial reach,” Comey said at a Boston College conference on cybersecurity. The remark came as he was discussing the rise of encryption since Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance tools, used on citizens around the world...

So, where does this leave us? Is privacy really dead, as Silicon Valley luminaries such as Mark Zuckerberg have previously declared?

Not according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s executive director, Cindy Cohn.

“The freedom to have a private conversation – free from the worry that a hostile government, a rogue government agent or a competitor or a criminal are listening – is central to a free society,” she said."

FBI's James Comey: 'There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America'; Guardian, March 8, 2017

Julian Borger, Guardian; 

FBI's James Comey: 'There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America'

[Kip Currier: 2,000th post since starting this Ethics Blog in 2010. Very thought-provoking privacy (are we now in a "post-privacy world"?) quote by FBI Director Comey--great fodder for Information Ethics class discussions, as well as around "the dinner table" and workplace water cooler/caffeine dispenser!]

"“There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America,” the FBI director, James Comey, has declared after the disclosure of a range of hacking tools used by the CIA.

Comey was delivering prepared remarks at a cybersecurity conference in Boston, but his assessment has deepened privacy concerns already raised by the details of CIA tools to hack consumer electronics for espionage published by WikiLeaks on Tuesday.

“All of us have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes, in our cars, and in our devices. But it also means with good reason, in court, government, through law enforcement, can invade our private spaces,” Comey said at the conference on Wednesday. “Even our memories aren’t private. Any of us can be compelled to say what we saw … In appropriate circumstances, a judge can compel any of us to testify in court on those private communications.”"

Former Bush Ethics Lawyer Files Complaint Against FBI Director for Email Disclosures; Slate, 10/30/16

Daniel Politi, Slate; Former Bush Ethics Lawyer Files Complaint Against FBI Director for Email Disclosures:

"The former chief ethics lawyer at the White House during George W. Bush’s presidency has filed an ethics complaint against FBI Director James Comey. In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Sunday, Richard W. Painter writes that he filed a complaint against the FBI for violating the Hatch Act, "which bars the use of an official position to influence an election." He filed the complaint with both the Office of Special Counsel and the Office of Government Ethics.

Painter, who was the head White House ethics lawyer between 2005 and 2007 and now supports Hillary Clinton, says Comey violated the Hatch Act when he sent the letter to lawmakers on Friday informing them of the newly discovered emails."

Legal, but Not Political, Clarity on the Clinton Emails; New York Times, 7/5/16

Editorial Board, New York Times; Legal, but Not Political, Clarity on the Clinton Emails:

"Mrs. Clinton’s desire to shield her private communications from public scrutiny may be understandable to supporters of her presidential campaign. But in leading one of the most sensitive departments in the federal government, she did little to improve what Mr. Comey called “the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified email systems in particular,” that “was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.”

As Mrs. Clinton said in the past, and her campaign reiterated on Tuesday, her decision to use private email was a mistake. She remains, far and away, the most experienced and knowledgeable candidate for the presidency, particularly when compared with Mr. Trump. But she has done damage to her reputation by failing to conform to the established security policies of the department she ran and by giving evasive or misleading answers about her actions and motivations. If there was ever a time that Mrs. Clinton needed to demonstrate that she understands the forthrightness demanded of those who hold the nation’s highest office, this is that moment."