flynn23 wrote:
Ask David Koresh or anyone who's crossed the IRS about the 4th or 5th amendment's support of 'privacy'. I know that there's ample legal precedent to support the interpretation of privacy as a 'right' when reading the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, but as we've been seeing over the last few years, those precedents don't mean jack shit given the current government climate. Without it being explicit, which it isn't, then it's open for interpretation. I'm all for the concept, but it's vague, and so not easily defensible.

I could not agree more. Most western states have an explicit constitutional privacy protection. There is a reason that Canada's DNS WHOIS policy is more sane then ICANNS and its not that they are generally less statist then Americans. The problem is that in the US the "right to privacy" has been tied to abortion, and the US is a wee bit more fundamentalist then most western states, and so the entire idea of Constitutional privacy protection has been slaughtered on the altar of theological morality. Its a non starter. And we're going to pay for that. This is going to have real costs for our culture in the information age. I don't see an easy way out. All I can do is reference Griswold, which seems quite obvious to me in it's conclusions about privacy, in the context of the Internet and hope people get it and that the abortion debate moves closer to its actual roots, the question of when life begins. (Frankly, I suspect the reason that the fundies like to attack Griswold is that if they succeed they don't just get abortion, they get homosexuality and a vast array of other "perversions" they want to regulate. If they focus on the matter of life specifically they won't gain any other ground from their victory...)

RE: Pentagon Expands Domestic Surveillance