No.
Do you know what cluster analysis is?
Data mining of our phone records has been going on for years.
I don’t know what you mean by crunch phone records. That would seem to be close to analogous.
Reading mail is not analogous to blind data mining of phone call records. That would be analogous to listening to phone conversations. That would require a warrant.
In blind data mining, what is searched or seized that relates to any individual specifically?
What does your contract with the phone provider say? No one is forced to use their service.
“Data mining of our phone records has been going on for years.”
Yes, but we’re talking about internet data mining, which is certainly a much more potentially invasive thing. Also, the government, to this day, has never admitted that it conducts data mining of domestic phone records, even though numerous sources and media outlets have reported that they do. They never sought authorization from the FISA courts for that program. They’ve never won a single court decision authorizing it, and have instead tried to invoke national security to get any lawsuits quashed.
Considering all that, the fact that they may have done unauthorized phone data mining for years is no kind of argument that the newly revealed internet data mining is lawful.
“Reading mail is not analogous to blind data mining of phone call records. That would be analogous to listening to phone conversations. That would require a warrant.”
Says who? If you can cite a court case that has decided data mining is not a search covered by the fourth amendment, then go right ahead. Otherwise, to quote the Dude: “that’s just, like, your opinion, man”.
“In blind data mining, what is searched or seized that relates to any individual specifically?”
The fact that they aren’t searching specifically is not a defense, it’s an indictment. The only kind of search they can possibly get authorization for is a specific one. Any nonspecific search is automatically unlawful and can’t be authorized by any court, short of a martial law or national emergency type situation.
For example, if they want to search my home, they can get authorization. If they want to just search every home in a particular zip code, there is no way in hell they could obtain a lawful warrant. If they tried a search like that in the real world, we’d all recognize it as the act of a police state. Instead, they just rummage through all of our virtual pockets and we are supposed to pretend that this is okay? I don’t think so!
“What does your contract with the phone provider say? No one is forced to use their service.”
That’s irrelevant. A contract with a private party can’t annul our constitutional protections. Certainly those contracts can protect the company from liability if they comply with an unlawful request from the government, but they can do nothing to make such a request lawful. Also, the very nature of the internet is such that every provider is handling traffic from many users who have not signed any contract with them, and then handing that data over to the government along with the traffic from their own customers.