Right to Privacy: Does it Exist?

My wife forwarded me an article today from a lady named Wendy McElroy who writes an editorial for Fox News called IFeminist. She's clearly right leaning but if you mentally remove the editorialized sentences you find that she is making some very excellent points and I highly recommend her.

 

Looking through her archives I found this article which intrigued me. The right to privacy is truly going to be the next big legal frontier. The reason is that there is no right to privacy, at least not one that is established by our Constitution. That's an extreme statement but if you read the Constitution you'll find that your best hope towards establishing a right to privacy rests in the 3rd and 4th amendments. Court rulings have been fairly consistent in establishing even the vaguest of privacy rights only so far as the government is concerned. Stars can't sue for having their pictures taken, for example. Congress has never passed a sweeping law that establishes some kind of national level of privacy for the citizenry.

 

This right to privacy is very interesting. The right wants the courts to respect a privacy right that doesn't, technically, exist (at least not in codified law). But they also want the various intelligence gathering bodies to be able to track and monitor people and to increase the ease with which search warrants are awarded. The left would prefer that everyone be able to be completely anonymous except with regards to the government bureaucracy who really ought to no pretty much everything there is to know about you. Both sides accuse the other side of seeking judicial activism while denying that they want it themselves...

 

I propose no solution for these problems as I feel there are many right and wrong ways to look at things... I don't want for America to become an insular, secret society in which the right to privacy allows us to hide anything and everything... I also don't want society to become a completely open book ( Arthur C. Clark's The Light of Other Days is a fascinating look at that potential phenomenon) in which we have only our brains to hide things in...