Page 3 - TIPJar Winter 2018

Does Anyone Really Expect

Privacy?

BY
ROBERTA L. ROWE
AND
LEE BURDICK

small drone flies 350 feet While our government hunts But what happens when the
above the ground through terrorists around the world, line blurs between our personal
A the beautiful rust-colored another battle rages within U.S. freedom from government
mountains. A dusty road flows borders: The conflict between intrusion and our social contract
around the mountainside and our government’s obligation to to forgo personal interests,
opens up to a plateau of rock and protect America’s homeland and when necessary, for greater
sand. There sits a cluster of large each citizen’s right to be free public security? As government
industrial buildings, caked with from government intrusion. That use of technology advances
red mountain dust. The buildings conflict is magnified when new exponentially faster, that line
cover approximately a million surveillance technologies disturb may disappear entirely, which
square feet, the size of three the balance between privacy begs the question: Do we have a
football fields in each direction. and safety. More importantly, reasonable expectation of privacy
The facility is shielded from the that war is being fought locally, anymore?
road by 10-foot concrete walls in our cities, counties and school
and a checkpoint with guards, districts. A Brief History of Privacy
dogs and guns.
Since 1998, Americans have Though the right to privacy is
Inside, the buildings hum with increased their Internet use revered as fundamental, the
the whir of supercomputers by over 42 percent, and 75 phrase never appears in the
that store gargantuan amounts percent of citizens now access U.S. Constitution, nor in the
of data, including emails, phone it regularly, for everything from Bill of Rights. The closest our
calls, Google searches and telephone service and email to founders came to a “right to
electronic communications from online shopping and schooling. privacy” is inferred from various
around the world. The machines What most Internet users often constitutional amendments.
download data at the rate of 20 don’t consider is that almost In 1965, Justice William O.
terabytes—the equivalent of any electronic communication Douglas explained in Griswold v.
the entire Library of Congress— can be monitored, scanned and Connecticut:
every minute. Is this a delusional stored indefinitely without their
conspiracy theory? A dark knowledge. Their public activities “Various [constitutional]
fantasy? An imagined dystopian can be watched and recorded guarantees create zones
future? This is the National in the finest resolution. Facial of privacy. The right of
Security Agency’s $1.5 billion recognition software can identify association contained in
Utah Data Center, located in people in public spaces almost the penumbra of the First
Bluffdale, Utah, the first place the instantaneously. Yet most of us Amendment is one. … The
government goes to search for move through the world with little Third Amendment, in its
terrorists, foreign and domestic. concern for these technological prohibition against the
intrusions. quartering of soldiers ‘in any

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