Burnsys said:Also I don't know if in the US the supreme court is bound by it's own previous decisions, known as stare decisis (in the UK the House of Lords is) but if not then perhaps somebody was hoping for a different judgement from a new bench.
They're not the same thing, but they're closely intertwined. Everyone does legal things that they don't want others to know about, and removing the right of privacy removes our freedom to do those things.I'm a big fan of the Constitution, a big fan of freedom/liberty, and a big fan of Democracy, but freedom and privacy are not the same thing, and there is a good reason there is no specific right to privacy laid out in the Bill of Rights.
Personally I feel you've made a persuasive argument, particularly in regard to how much the forefathers could predict the future (e.g., the thought police). I agree the right to privacy is one of our unalienable rights that the framers did not need to specify per se.Manchot said:Hmm, either my argument was persuasive, or I'm a thread killer. (Or no one replied since I resurrected the thread after a three day ban.) Regardless, I'd like to pose a question to those who don't believe that there is a right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. Do I have the right to think about whatever I feel like? If technology is invented in the future that allows the government to disallow thoughts, is that constitutional? It certainly isn't in the Constitution. Did the founding fathers leave the right to think out for a good reason?
I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program, which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it's been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project
How much of the "takes undue effort to spy" privacy are people really losing.Manchot said:They're not the same thing, but they're closely intertwined. Everyone does legal things that they don't want others to know about, and removing the right of privacy removes our freedom to do those things.
Moreover, just because the right to privacy is not delineated in the Bill of Rights, it does not mean that it isn't a right. It is well-documented that many of the Founding Fathers were concerned that by including the Bill of Rights in the Constitution, people would get the wrong idea that everything left out isn't a right. The only reason that the right to privacy wasn't included is because back in the eighteenth century, privacy was not a big concern. Why? Quite simply, it wasn't possible to take it away, any more than it is possible nowadays to take away a conscious person's right to think about a particular subject. There was no method for surveillance short of hiring someone to secretly follow someone around, a method which is unreliable at best. Is that a "good reason?" I don't think so.
Finally, just because phone records aren't private per se, it doesn't mean that they should be used. On a given day, you might do many things in public places that aren't private per se: you might go to work, to the grocery store, to the bank, etc. There are probably security cameras recording the fact that you are there. However, you still retain a large degree of privacy through anonymity, and no one will track your motion for an extended period of time, because it would take undue effort to do so. The point is that there is more than one kind of privacy, and if large databases of phone records are kept, you lose the "takes undue effort to spy" privacy.
By the way, there was a news story a couple days ago regarding a program that the NSA had a few years ago that would anonymously collect phone records and would keep them encrypted to prevent abuses by those in authority. It was cut when the current administration gave them permission to do so without abuse preventions. Shows what they think of privacy.