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One of the hot issues this year, on many political fronts, is privacy. Many people have complained that the census long form is an invasion of privacy. The legislature has considered bills to shield the names of the holders of concealed-weapons permits and to allow the victims of crimes to petition judges to keep their names from being released to the public.
There was an announcement from Washington that the president's release of letters written to him were a violation of the authors' right to privacy. It's hard to escape from the chorus of worries about privacy on the Internet, where every click you make can be tracked and analyzed.
With a little work, I could probably find dozens of
other recent privacy concerns, but the trend should be
clear: people worry a lot more about their right of
privacy
now than at any time I can remember.
Our American Bill of Rights never explicitly declares a
right of privacy
in the way it presents a right
of the people to keep and bear Arms
or a right of
the people peaceably to assemble.
It does imply a privacy right in the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated ...
From that, various courts have extrapolated a right of privacy, as with Roe v. Wade, which said there are certain zones that government cannot penetrate where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Governments at all levels have to balance privacy against public interest. At every small-town newspaper I've edited, I endeavored to publish the county's real-estate transfers: who bought which property for how much, along with the particulars of the mortgage.
Of course there were complaints from people that this
was an invasion of their privacy.
But Colorado does
not consider the purchase of real property a private
matter. We elect our county assessors and treasurers, and
so we have to be able to evaluate their conduct in
office.
The assessor is less likely to give a friend or campaign contributor a sweetheart below-market appraisal if the records are open for public inspection.
So on one side, there's the legitimate demand to hold
public officials accountable. And on the other, an
understandable feeling that this isn't anybody else's
business.
But in those days, the property transfers were before the public -- a public of a few thousand people in my part of the world -- until the next paper came out. After that, it took some digging, at the courthouse or library, to find them.
Now we've got the Internet, wherein such data can be quickly searched, remain easily available indefinitely, and are accessible across the planet.
Even if both the Internet and the local newspaper both
publish
the information in a legal sense, there is a
big difference. It's one thing if a guy down the street
sees how much you paid for your house, and uses the
information in pricing his house that he wants to sell.
It's quite another when a total stranger in another state
can make a couple of clicks and get your telephone number
so that he can call you during dinner hour with a great
deal on carpets for your new house.
So changes in technology that make public information more accessible doubtless account for much of the increased public concern about privacy.
Other new technology, like tiny spy cameras and widespread surveillance gear, along with improved satellite imagery, also raise privacy concerns.
If you're outdoors, there's no way to be sure that you're not being photographed. The same holds if you're indoors. The property owner can set up cameras almost anywhere, and how sure can you be that nobody has installed equipment in your own house?
Then throw in the modern demands for security. It was once presumed that domestic travel was a private matter. Indeed, during my grade-school years we were taught that one of the great evils of the Soviet Union was that it required internal passports, whereas we Americans were free to come and go. And now you must show a photo ID to board an airplane.
Society also now demands extensive background
checks
for many occupations, along with invasive blood
analysis to check for improper chemicals.
America seems to be schizophrenic about privacy. We want more for ourselves, but less for everyone else. Given that, privacy will be a hot topic for a long time -- there's no way to resolve that conflict.
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