When I was a law student in 1972, a bunch of us wrote and solicited articles that we published about the horrors of the government invading our individual right to be let alone; it was all about government surveillance and the right of privacy.
The best part was a meeting with Senator Sam Ervin from North Carolina who agreed to write an article for our publication, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review; this was before the nation knew Senator Ervin as the Chair of the Senate Watergate hearings.
The Senator was concerned in 1972 about the “insatiable curiosity of the government to know everything about those it governs.” He said, “Some agencies take the attitude that the information belongs to them and the last person who should see it is the individual whom it is about.” At the time, “Army agents were sent throughout the country to keep surveillance over the way the civilian population expressed their sentiments about government policies.”
Our article on remote camera systems for surveillance of public streets seems quaint when you consider “modern” technology. Thanks to Justice Department funding, Mt. Vernon had installed in 1971 low light TV cameras from Sylvania that could rotate 355 degrees in a horizontal plane and 120 degrees in a vertical plane; they could read a license plate or see a face ½ mile away, and could take photographs even through store or apartment windows.
George Orwell’s dystopian Novel, 1984, included telescreens by the ruling party of Oceania, monitored by the thought police, to watch its subjects, supposedly so they could stop any chance of secret conspiracies against the government.
If we fast forward to the present, we have the biggest, “baddest” computing power in the world, as well as the Internet with its digital back alleys, GPS satellites, thermography, electronic bugs, and all manner of possibly intrusive devices that may infringe upon our privacy. In order to bank, phone, and transact business online, we surrender private information for good reason that can be used for wrong and unconsented purposes. Private Telecomm carriers reportedly are cooperating with the government to collect and analyze data about all of us.
There is encouraging news, however, that the supreme law of the land still favors our individual privacy. Last week, the Supreme Court curbed the government’s excessive reliance on GPS surveillance techniques – and made some significant observations about hi-tech devices that threaten to hi-jack our privacy.
In the case that was decided, the government placed a tracking device on Antoine Jones’ Jeep Grand Cherokee for four weeks without a valid warrant. The government knew within 50-100 feet where Jones was 24/7 and generated 2,000 pages of personal data about his personal activities.
Justice Scalia, writing for the Court, said the Fourth Amendment guaranteed each individual the right “to be secure” in his person, house, paper and “effects” and a “vehicle” was an “effect” that was impermissibly searched by this GPS monitoring technique.
Justice Sotomayor said that we are not only protected against trespass of our “effects” but also violations of our “reasonable expectation of privacy.” She charged that this e-surveillance “chills associational and expressive freedoms” and is “susceptible to abuse” and “inimical to democratic society.”
Sotomayor expressed the concern that we are going to have to re-visit how we handle abuses of the information that we disclose to third parties for one purpose that is abused for different purposes and that includes the phone numbers we dial, the text messages we send, the urls we visit, the e-mails we write and receive, and the online purchases of books, groceries and medications.
Justice Alito joined the chorus of concern with a somewhat different analysis but focused as well on how “closed-circuit television video monitoring is becoming ubiquitous” on toll roads and elsewhere.
While this decision is a hopeful sign that we may still have some right of privacy, we are going to have to be vigilant.
By the way, does anyone know what those cameras at the traffic stop in Leesburg on East Market Street are capturing – they appear to be on 24/7?
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