The Dead Past: the Biggest Threat To Privacy Is Us

An anonymous reader writes "Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals candidly discusses the future of privacy law in an essay published today in the Stanford Law Review Online. Referencing an Isaac Asimov short story, Kozinski acknowledges a serious threat to our privacy — but not from corporations, courts, or Congress: 'Judges, legislators and law enforcement officials live in the real world. The opinions they write, the legislation they pass, the intrusions they dare engage in—all of these reflect an explicit or implicit judgment about the degree of privacy we can reasonably expect by living in our society. In a world where employers monitor the computer communications of their employees, law enforcement officers find it easy to demand that internet service providers give up information on the web-browsing habits of their subscribers.'" (Excerpt continues below.) "In a world where people post up-to-the-minute location information through Facebook Places or Foursquare, the police may feel justified in attaching a GPS to your car. In a world where people tweet about their sexual experiences and eager thousands read about them the morning after, it may well be reasonable for law enforcement, in pursuit of terrorists and criminals, to spy with high-powered binoculars through people's bedroom windows or put concealed cameras in public restrooms. In a world where you can listen to people shouting lurid descriptions of their gall-bladder operations into their cell phones, it may well be reasonable to ask telephone companies or even doctors for access to their customer records. If we the people don't consider our own privacy terribly valuable, we cannot count on government — with its many legitimate worries about law-breaking and security — to guard it for us.'"

Comments

Re:Wat?

[dgatwood]

Worse than that. What the judge is saying is effectively that because you choose to disclose things about yourself, that it is reasonable for police to force me to disclose those same things about myself.

Rights do not cease to be rights merely because the majority of people do not exercise them; so long as even one person considers something to be private, the state has no legitimate authority to treat it otherwise unless failure to do so would pose an immediate threat of grave harm to another person. Period.

Re:How do you mod a judge insightful?

[Hatta]

Sorry, he's full of shit. I value my privacy, and I don't splatter intimate details of my private life all over the internet. Do you think the cops are going to check whether I have a facebook page before they take infrared images of my house?

No, the biggest threat to my privacy is the fucking government.

Re:Relevancy

[ilsaloving]

Unless there is clear damage to an employer's reputation, and I am talking legal libel/slander standards, I don't see any justification for judging of punishing people for "inappropriate" conduct. People shouldn't have to be paranoid about privacy. Are we all supposed to live our lives according to the standards of the most uptight HR weenie?

People should be able to trade their password for a chocolate bar, because it is illegal to steal.

People *shouldn't* have to be paranoid about their privacy, but that's not how the world currently works. What we are seeing in the world now, is exactly what we should expect to happen. These same people who don't care about their personal privacy, are the same people who have no problem voting for officials who also don't care about the voter's personal privacy. I mean, look what happened to the legislation that was supposed to ban employers from demanding facebook passwords? It got killed off. Employers *shouldn't* be abusing publicly available information like this. But, surprise surprise, they are. Why? Because no one is saying that they can't.

Freedom, liberty, and security are not like features that you can tick off on a spec sheet once you've obtained it, not worrying about it evermore. You have to fight for them, and you have to *always* be on guard of having them taken away. Since the majority of the North American populace doesn't care enough to look beyond their next text message, the best that the rest of us can do is do what we can to avoid being swept up in the inevitable tide.

That's the point I was trying to make

All these comments are "shooting the messenger"

[S77IM]

The judge agrees with you. He's trying to warn you. His warning is that it's all too easy for government agents to fall into the trap of thinking that you describe when people do not actively guard their own privacy. He's not saying that this is right and proper, he's describing the world as it is, not as it should be.

  -- 77IM, we need a moderation "-1, Clearly Didn't RTFA"