US Congress Committee Talking About Privacy

There is no Constitutional right to privacy by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-13 01:17 · Score: 5, Informative

The real problem here is that there is no Constitutional right to privacy.

Sure, some use amendments to imply one, but it just is not there, and the same amendments can be used to imply such things as a supposed "right to security" which can erode a supposed "right to privacy".

Time for an amendment.

Re:There is no Constitutional right to privacy by John+Seminal · 2004-02-13 01:25 · Score: 5, Interesting

I disagree. I think when you take the whole of the bill of rights and the constitution, there is a right to privacy the courts have recognized in the past. I do not want to look it up, but wording in one case was somthing like: "the courts must defend against the long arm of the government peering into the circle of individual liberty". If anyone wants, I can look up the exact case. If we are really free, then we have a right to privacy as that is a product of freedom. There is no right at all for someone to invade another persons house, papers, posessions, or the like without a court approving it. We have the right to form private groups, as the right to associate. So I see it very different than those who will let government take away our rights. I know those rights exsist and am not willing to let go of them.
It is only when government overstepps its boundry does the right of privacy dissapear, and often it is like the frog telling of the ecological disaster to come. Remember Hoover and his FBI? They were the ones who tapped the phones of political groups. And remember Nixon?
Defend your liberty or lose it.

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Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Re:There is no Constitutional right to privacy by Joel+Carr · 2004-02-13 01:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

Perhaps it is time for an amendment, but given the way things seem to be headed at the moment, do you think any amendment would be made in the right direction?

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Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
Re:There is no Constitutional right to privacy by BranMan · 2004-02-13 01:33 · Score: 5, Informative

Actually, the Constitution is very specific - I paraphrase: "Any right not enumerated is considered to belong to the people". Since privacy is NOT mentioned, it cannot be infringed by the Federal Gov. - the people have a right to privacy.

The framers, and the drafters of the "Bill of Rights" did not want to fall into the trap of forgetting something, so they made sure they had a safety net in place. They weren't dummies.
Re:There is no Constitutional right to privacy by John+Seminal · 2004-02-13 01:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

I think it is the will of government and the will of those in power to take away as many freedoms and rights as they can. I doubt you will ever have the conditions again which formed our country. Back then, you had people who experianced government infringing on them. They knew what it was like to have the State dictate the course of their life, their religion, their associations. When they wrote the constitution, they wanted to protect everyone from those breaches of power. They believed it was a natural god given right to be free, to have freedom. Today you see those freedoms being limited slowly, one peice at a time.
Just remember this rule, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
People act for their self benifit, and when they can to help their friends. Look at Bush and the oil industry or Cheney and Halliburton. Cheney will make millions from them when he leaves the white house. The temptation is too great. That is why we need rules in place to protect those in power from abusing the power we give them.

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Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Re:There is no Constitutional right to privacy by Mark_in_Brazil · 2004-02-13 02:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

Actually, the Constitution is very specific - I paraphrase: "Any right not enumerated is considered to belong to the people". Since privacy is NOT mentioned, it cannot be infringed by the Federal Gov. - the people have a right to privacy.

The framers, and the drafters of the "Bill of Rights" did not want to fall into the trap of forgetting something, so they made sure they had a safety net in place. They weren't dummies.
What you're talking about here is the Tenth Amendment, the last part of the original Bill of Rights. Amendment X is all of 28 words. Here they are:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

In the 1996 Presidential campaign, Bob Dole flew a couple of trial balloons about "dusting off the Tenth Amendment," which was Republican code for "get rid of social programs we don't like." I laughed and wondered if ol' Bob would be willing to have a real discussion of dusting off the Tenth Amendment and doing away with all the power the US Government has taken on without that power having been delegated to the government by the Constitution. Of course not!
The Tenth Amendment, like the Second, was designed to protect the people from the very government whose powers are specified by the Constitution. The Second Amendment was not about armies or self-defense against foreign invaders, as its modern-day opponents allege; it was designed to prevent the usurpation of power by the Federal Government that has in fact occurred over the 217+ years since the Constitution was written. I am sad to report that the meaning of the Second and Tenth Amendments is largely forgotten (favorite funny slogan for the ACLU: "Defending the rights guaranteed by the Amendments of the Bill of Rights-- all nine of them") and basically ended up amounting to nothing more than mere speedbumps, only slowing down (definitely NOT preventing) the theft of power from citizens of the USA by the government of the USA.

It's a little sad that I have to say this, but even though I've criticized both the Republicans and the ACLU (and thus, basically the entire political "spectrum" of the USA), this is not intended as any kind of troll. The meaning of the two Amendments in question is clear if you read the Constitution itself and other writings from the same time by the "framers" of the Constitution. The framers, having had to fight a war against a government they felt did not represent them, were very worried about their new government becoming like the one against which they had fought. Washington voluntarily stepping down after two terms as President due to concerns that he could become like a new "king" shows that this concern continued until at least 1797, more than 15 years after the end of the American Revolutionary War and more than a decade after the Constitution was written.

--Mark

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"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Re:There is no Constitutional right to privacy by Dalcius · 2004-02-13 04:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is what you get when people will vote for anyone who will agree to give them something.

Everyone has this idea that the government is there to make the country great. Wrong. The government is there to protect you so you can live your life to your own choosing.

The day has come where YOU are no longer expected to make your country great, you just tell your government to do it for you. Charity, morals, economic power regulation, all of these things have been passed to your lawmakers. Do you think you have more control over these powers in your lawmakers' hands than in your own?

Government is a tool to control power, but the individual action, the individual decision, the individual debate, the individual dollar, the individual volunteer hour... all of these things are tools more powerful than those proxied off to a self-interested, self-perpetuating government.

The problem with government is, it's all or nothing. We either outlaw X or allow X, we take money from group A and give to group B, there are few gray areas.

Government is a sledgehammer and should be used as such and only as such. It might be a good idea to consider making your country great on your own.

At the risk of sounding resoundingly cheesy, I'll end this with a quote:

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
-- H. L. Mencken

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~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Re:There is no Constitutional right to privacy by Loki_1929 · 2004-02-13 05:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

" The real problem here is that there is no Constitutional right to privacy."

And thus, you, like so many before you, have fallen prey to the most diabolical usurption of power in the history of government - that the Constitution grants rights to the people. In fact, the Constitution specifically enumerates a small number of things with which the Federal government is tasked, and goes on to specifically state that anything not mentioned IS a right of the states, or of the people. The primary argument raised against support for the Bill of Rights was that an enumeration of specific rights could, at some point in time, be construed by a corrupt Federal government leadership to mean that the only rights citizens have are those granted to them under the Constitution.

The problem with this line of thinking is that once you begin to argue with the government over which rights you do and do not have, the argument inevitably shifts to which rights the government chooses to grant you. The instant this becomes the topic for debate, you've already lost. A government that grants rights to its citizens is a government that can revoke those rights as soon as they become inconvenient or run counter to the particular goals at hand. Thus, we have government agents who may legally break into a citizen's home, confiscate their property, bug their computers and telephones, and may do so with a secret warrant obtained under secret proceedings where the burden of 'proof' is reduced to an agent's vague and generic answers to questions by a panel of judges whose hands are virtually tied into granting every application.

Let there be no mistake - the FISA court is nothing more than a single degree of seperation between the FBI and the KGB. It is a rubber stamp court whose sole purpose is to lend a sliver of credibility to something which would otherwise provoke riots in the streets.

I don't need an amendment to tell me which rights I have - I need an amendment to punish those who violate my rights with our most severe penalties. I want to see an amendment that provides for life in prison for members of congress who vote up legislation that blatantly violates the God-given/creator-granted/natural-born rights of the citizens of this country. Seeing as some see fit to ignore the highest laws of our land, I think it's time we spelled out specific and severe criminal punishments for those who just can't seem to keep their hands off the rights of the people. While it might be inconvenient to imprison every member of congress who voted up the PATRIOT ACT, it would certainly set the tone for further debate. While we're at it, I think we need a nice, long-winded amendment discussing just which things the Federal government can and cannot stick its nose into. Once we've cleared out all the crap that's accumulated over the past 100 years or so, (things like the 'War on Drugs', Corporate welfare, most of current welfare other such programs), I think we'll find that paying down the national debt is rather simple. Once that's payed down, we can rescind the Federal income tax - an unconstitutional 'head tax' that was passed under the pretext that it was a temporary emergency measure. Your state taxes will go up substantially, but will be nowhere near what they are now, when combined with Federal taxes.

Wiping out 60 - 70% of the Federal government's current tasks, jobs, budget, and powers would bring this country to a century of unparalleled prosperity and freedom. The Federal tyranny began with Lincoln's unconstitutional war against the break-away southern states, and continues to grow in size and power even today. At this point, the titanic beast bleeds money, spits fire, and does little to no good for the American people. Let's give most of this money to the states and get people in state governments who are responsible enough to use it well.

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-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

This should be interesting. by neferusobek · 2004-02-13 01:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

sufficiently addresses concerns about the handling of personally identifiable information.

Personally I think this postion was a sham to begin with and the people who created it knew that or very early on there was a lack of concern for what this position was to be and no one adhered to these rules. Now they will evaluate it? I for one want to see how this turns out. If kelly recvies anything less than a failing grade that will just prove to me (and I'm sure many other) that HomeLandSecurity and no regards for privacy.

Re:Privacy by war3rd · 2004-02-13 01:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

Perhaps *you* do, but most of us probably just like to think we are not being spied on all the time. It makes me somewhat uncomfortable to be 'on camera,' so to speak, all the time. And the less privacy we have as a society the more danger there is to those of us who can be victimized by an admittedly small group of crimminal offenders. I would like my children to be safe, but there has to be a balance.

--
Got sushi? The Sushi FAQ

Patriot Act !~ /privacy/ by 99bottles · 2004-02-13 01:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

Does anyone see anything oxymoronic about the people that gave us the Patriot Act talking about privacy?

HIPPA by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-13 01:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

Government is on the right track with laws like HIPPA, as we see the government already acting against Doctors who publicly released Dr. Atkins medical records. However, privacy laws need to go further ...

The US needs UK like data privacy laws where no company or organization can ship private information outside the homeland's jurisdiction. This will not only help keep jobs in the country but protect the US from a digital "Pearl Harbor"

Re:HIPPA by neferusobek · 2004-02-13 01:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

"Government is on the right track with laws like HIPPA...."
The right track? Maybe. They are defintely on the same track though. Using it when its a high profile person and everyone else gets loss in the fray. When the govt' standardizes the HIPPA procedures then maybe I can agree with you. Passing a law and then having people execute/follow the *same* law in differnt ways will lead to loopholes and do more harm than good.

A small explanation by deltagreen · 2004-02-13 01:21 · Score: 4, Informative

For those that weren't immediately able to understand what the story is about (that includes me), here is the start of the Wired article:

For the third year in a row, a bipartisan congressional coalition is pushing a bill that would require all government agencies to study the privacy impact of new rules before they put them into effect.

The Defense of Privacy Act (PDF), which was approved by a House subcommittee on Tuesday, would complement the E-Government Act of 2001, which requires agencies to submit privacy impact assessments whenever they buy new technology

Re:A small explanation by El+Torico · 2004-02-13 01:40 · Score: 4, Informative

And here is a very important quote from that same article,
"The bill doesn't tell agencies they can't issue regulations that violate people's privacy rights," Nojeim said. "It simply tells them they must consider alternative, privacy-sensitive regulations. They don't have to adopt those, however."

Which translates as, "We may be just window-dressing here."
There is an inherent conflict between privacy and security, and it is good to see that this is at least being revisited. Election years are good times to review policies, so maybe there is a serious intent to protect everyone's privacy in the US, but I have doubts.

--
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.

Privacy vs protection by hthiefshorty · 2004-02-13 01:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

I am in the military, and completely understand the need to protect the United States and its citizens from terrorist. That being said, I am afraid some of the measures put into place by the Patriot Act and other knee-jerk legislation have the two problems: 1) They would not have been effective if they were in place on September 10, and 2) They either infringe on basic rights, or they expose people to addition dangers implicit with having person information stored in a database. The problem starts with people writing the legislation not having a clear understanding of the technology they want to employ. The problem gets worse when the next generation expands the programs to use data for purposes the original drafters of the legislation never intended. For a government built on checks and balances, this is unacceptable. Each agency reviewing the use of personal information only works as well as the people doing the review. We need hard standards that specify what the government can collect, and some kind of legislation that limits access to the information in the future. Blanket cries of national defense are starting to sound a little hollow.

you beat me to it... by tuxette · 2004-02-13 01:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

I was about ready to write "Oxymoron of the day: Privacy Officer for the Department of Homeland Security."

A nice little placebo position really. Let's make people think that privacy rights are being respected. It's like most privacy policies on websites; not worth the bandwidth they waste. Very little value when you don't have strong privacy laws as backup. And what's the point of having a privacy officer for the DHS when "anti-terrorism" laws don't allow for such things as being able to see what kind of information is registered on yourself in the first place?

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People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...

Like similar positions? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-13 01:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

I wonder if this "Minister of Privacy" position will be more like the EPA head who has gutted long-standing environmental laws. Now personally I've always thought that the Republican candidates had more respect for individual privacy laws and that Democrats were more likely to attempt to legislate morality (and you know as well as I that this is impossible). Plus, it seems there have always been fewer wackos running on the Republican tickets than on the Democratics ones.
Not in this administration.
Part of freedom is the ability to do what one pleases as long as it does not hurt or affect others. But now I'm seeing laws that allow the government (under the pretense of law enforcement) to surveil whoever they want without a judge giving the OK. This administration has soiled the sacrifices of those brave soldiers on earlier battlefields; it has twisted the tragic deaths of those on 9/11; it has waged war by deceiving the American public.

These are our new overlords.

Big Brother by frasherdabasher · 2004-02-13 01:43 · Score: 4, Interesting

What scares me the most is people are blind to see what letting the government collect information on people with out any control will bring to us. I think the government impact in our lives was to strong before the Patriot Act was ever dreamed up. The small rights they take away just will lead to the total control they might have over us in the end. More people need to start watching what our Governmental Officials are doing with our tax money. I think this new bill should have been put in place back in the early stages of telephone, satellites, and other communicational devices that the government can in some way use to listen in on our private lives.

while this is true... by tuxette · 2004-02-13 01:54 · Score: 5, Informative

Yes. Data on us are recorded every time we use a credit card or use the phone or buy a plane ticket or whatever else. However, the difference between the US and the EU is what can be done with this data.

Apparently in the US, "anything goes." Companies promise to keep data private, only to sell or transfer it to third parties, as in the case of several airlines. Sensitive personal data is outsourced to countries like India and Pakistan for processing. What happens? The natives can threaten to release this data if they're not paid a certain amount of money.

In Europe, EU and individual national laws dictate that this data can among other things only be used for a specific purpose determined before data collection, not be used for other purposes, and not be released to third parties without the consent of the data subject. Furthermore, personal data cannot be transferred to countries that do not have privacy laws equivalent to or stronger than the Directive.

The EU Directive is the rule; countries in the EU and EEA are required to have national privacy laws based on the Directive.

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People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...

The Fine Line in the Sand by al!ethel · 2004-02-13 02:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

It seems to me like we are walking a fine line between our security and our privacy. Some people are screaming to be "safe," while the other half of the population is screaming to keep individual "privacy." The positions in the Department of Homeland Security seem like a good place to set up someone to be shot down. Without a clear cut goal (none of this "make things better" stuff) all of the work that is done is totaly subjective. The department could be doing a great job, but there is no real way to tell. At the same time, if someone is doing a poor job, then we have no way to crucify the fool. With the extreem visibility of this position, it is also absurbly easy for the media to drag down anyone who does not fit what they want. Due to the subjective nature of the job, all the media has to do is make people feel unsafe and then the entire population will be howling for blood.

The thing that we need is well defined goals and some way of measuring preformance. Then I will start to worry about if I am giving up too much of my privacy in the cause of feeling "safe".

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If I could get a firm grip on reality, I'd choke it...

Worth watching? Err... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-13 02:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

Quote: This should be worth watching.

How about "worth getting off your duff and getting involved in?"

Democratic government (insert pfft! here) is not a spectator sport.

Summary of discussion by Phantasmo · 2004-02-13 02:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

Privacy of the people = security risk
Privacy of politicians = security measure

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The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience

Your basic problem. by transops.net · 2004-02-13 02:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

Here's the core issue: no one is safe against a sufficiently determined adversary, regardless of preventive measures which may have been put into place "ahead of time."

In fact, from a psychological perspective, putting too many ineffective barriers to harm in place may actually have the effect of lulling the populace (read: target) into a false sense of security. Case in point: grandmothers getting anal cavity searches during "routine" airport screenings (sorry for the nasty mental image, it's for purposes of illustration).

There is simply no way to reliably defend a large land mass against random insurgent attacks from loosely organized parties, especially when said attacking parties are comfortable with the notion of dying for their cause. I don't advocate our leaving Iraq anytime soon, as that would be utterly disastrous in the long term, but you only have to look at CNN each morning to note the steady stream of attacks on U.S. forces. True, the attacks don't have any significant impact on the forces deployed at large, but they will continue as long as people are willing to lay down their lives in the name of rebellion (or freedom, depending on which side of the fence you're standing on).

Personally, I think any measure of success in all of this goes back to people worrying about preserving their own immediate liberty first while still standing ready to defend their country as a whole against attack. This is not to be confused with attempting to play Dad to the entire nation while leaving one's own door unlocked, a practice many people seem somewhat adept at these days.

Of course, I'm probably going to be branded an armchair-this-or-that for my rambling, but so it goes.

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US Congress Committee Talking About Privacy

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