Well, I'm clearly not doing so poorly that no one understands what I'm getting at. I was calling out a tendency towards detracting pedantry that seems quite common amongst the "Karma Superstars" of Hacker News. Rayiner's interjection that the "actual" incitement to the penning of the fourth amendment was, specifically, the intrusion of the British into citizens' homes may be correct. If I understand correctly, he's (she's?) a lawyer by profession, so there's a good chance it is.

It's just irrelevant. It's technically true and completely beside the point that pvnick was making about the spirit of the law, something that rayiner seems to have a difficult grasp on given his (her?) incessant need to describe in condescending tone and dismissive language that "actually," "technically," whatever the person he's (she's?) responding to has said is, under statute or precedent or treaty or scholarly interpretation, incorrect. It's a frustrating way of avoiding responding to a person's clear and obvious point by instead nitpicking about this statute, or that precedent, or treaty X, while giving off the false impression that something relevant to the discussion at hand has been said. And the Hacker News community seems to gobble it up.

Rayiner doesn't need to spell out a claim in plain words and sentences for the tone of his message to convey one, though his choice of sentences often does. Hell, he's given a perfect example of what I'm talking about in a reply posted as I write this that I can only assume was mistakenly attached to my post rather than pvnick's. Everything he says about what the founders intended in the 1700s, and what the history of the law is, and why the original drafter specifically decided to include it in the Bill of Rights, may be 100 percent accurate. It just ignores the fact that laws are given meaning and power by people, and their meaning and power as seen by those people changes over time. To suggest that the fourth amendment "isn't about information" and that "it's protections don't attach to information and follow it around" is something that very clearly undermines what nearly every person in this democratic republic holds to be the purpose and power of the fourth amendment. My right to be secure in my effects doesn't end just because I place them on a server in a datacenter rather than a computer in my home, and it is absolutely disingenuous to suggest that the spirit of the law has not been violated by anyone in the legal profession that holds to that interpretation. It doesn't matter if a legal scholar adheres to a 20th century interpretation of a 19th century law that is absolutely bogus in the 21st century, because the point that myself or pvnick or any other user makes about the spirit of a law has nothing to do with the scholarly legal interpretation; it has to do with the actual point: that the government never has free reign over my effects, regardless of whether I keep them locked up, in a safe, in a home that I own, on land that I own, and never ever ever do anything with them; or whether I place them, unencrypted, on a server that I do not own, in a data center that I do not own. My emails do not become "unprotected communication" after 180 days. They do not become "unprotected communication" after 365 days. They do not become "unprotected communication" after five years. They _never_ become "unprotected communication" based on _any_ arbitrary time limit. No matter what any statute or precedent or treaty says to the contrary.