Privacy in America

I was watching a recent C-SPAN show which was/is part of a series on major Supreme Court cases. The one I watched was about a case in the 1960s  where the Court was considering the degree of privacy which a man in a telephone booth should expect and be granted by the state. Apparently the police wanted to tap the telephone booth line and catch the man who was a 'bookie'. At that time the precedent was to review each kind of place and situation to decide privacy rights and that of a man in a telephone booth had not been considered.

For young people today, a telephone booth was a small space, generally metal with glass panels, with a telephone owned by AT&T ("Ma Bell") and you could go into the booth, put money in the phone, dial a number and get service. There were no cell phones.

The lawyer representing the bookie was only out of college a short time and he had never been before the Supreme Court, so it was a new experience. Perhaps that was part of the reason he thought differently during the case and it may have allowed him to "think outside of the box". Usually a lawyer before the Court has to stick to the facts established at the lower court and to the arguments made in written briefs. In this instance he had an epiphany during oral arguments before the Court and it was powerful, so the Justices allowed him to argue it. The idea was contrary to established law, that Privacy rights were not located in the phone booth or home or office or automobile, but with the Person. The Founders of this nation had no idea about a telephone or automobile or cell phone and they had a clear idea that Privacy was about the person's personal papers and their body. This lawyer won the day. The Court decided in his favor with only one dissenting justice who continued to argue for the older concept.

This evening I was watching a C-SPAN show with two guests being interviewed about the Facebook case, Mark Zuckerberg, and Privacy. It was fascinating to see this same argument arising all over again and the male guest argued the OLD policy that privacy had to do with the kinds of information or data, where it was held, who had access to it, but not to the rights of the person to ALL data and information they had provided or generated.

As a minor digression, I would suggest that had Conservatives in America paid attention to the issue of Privacy over the last years since the Roe v. Wade decision, we might not have this difficulty today. We would realize that individuals' privacy is protected by the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that isn't related to where they are.

As a potential solution the two guests posited an idea, that there may need to be some government law which provides a foundation of Privacy for everyone's information not entirely unlike what they have done in the European Union. Isn't it ironic that the EU would have protected Privacy before America realized we already have such a law in the U.S. Constitution, if only Conservatives would stick to reading the plain text of the Constitution and apply that Law.

So, yes, we will probably need a federal government law, and probably a Supreme Court decision, to forcibly protect individuals' data and information from being made public or given to those who pay or given to political interest groups (such as Cambridge Analytica). Democrats have argued for decades that this is so. Perhaps now that Russians have meddled in our Democracy, some other people will catch on too.