If there is no right to privacy then freedom does not exist

[DesEtoiles]

[The Traveler]

1. That, and not abortion, is why Ann Coulter and her ghoulish crew

are so desperate to establish there is no right to privacy.

Make no mistake ... their language is the calculated rhetoric of would be tyrants.

[mmonk]

2. Correct

[madrchsod]

3. the right to privacy was never written into our constitution

that is what the extreme right uses for it`s arguments and of course strictly speaking they are right.

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. That is incorrect.

9th amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This, in conjunction with the 4th which forbids unreasonable search and seizure, a notion that would have no meaning if privacy and security in ones own home is not assumed, clearly means that the right of privacy is one of the 'unenumerated' rights retained by the people.

When anyone throws 'no right of privacy in the constitution' at you, ask them what right is being defended by the 4th amendment, then kick them in the shins with the 9th.

[flowomo]

5. the 4th and 9th could be construed as property rights...

and if it was as easy as you say, then the court would not have needed the torturous "emanations of the penumbra" argument in Griswold. I'm glad they made that stretch, but a stretch was needed. What puzzles me is how the framers missed it in the first place. I think they meant to protect "privacy," but did not take the simple route if so.

[madrchsod]

12. the word "privacy "meant something

entirely different when the constitution was written. this is what the wing nuts base their arguements-on a word that has an entirely different meaning today. of course the "to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" does mean "privacy" today.....
http://journals.aol.com/demyngeiv/SgtReedysEditorials/entries/702
to live, liberty and the prusuit of happiness

[Erika]

6. The Constitution was written without a thought for women

or slaves. It was penned by a bunch of white land owners, many of who owned slaves. The Constitution needs to be replaced.

[mestup]

7. Much like the Bible, the Constitution requires finely tuned interpretation

to make it relevant to its modern day believers.


Vulnerable Senate Seats by State http://www.removerepublicans.com
Vulnerable House Seats by State http://www.ourcongress.org/

[tocqueville]

11. how about writing a new one ?

instead of interpreting texts written 230 years ago in a completely different cultural context ?

sounds like a lot of Bible reading to me

[mestup]

15. I'd go for that. But the Constitution is the Holy Grail in this country.

(Much like the Bible.)
Good luck trying to re-write it in this flag-waving atmosphere.

[kurth]

10. Many things are not "mentioned" in the Constitution

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0811-28.htm

Many of the strongest advocates of liberty among our Founding Fathers had argued against adopting a Bill of Rights. They feared that listing certain explicit constitutional rights — the right to pray and speak as you wish, for example — might imply that other unlisted natural rights have no standing. In essence, they argued that if we can't list all of our rights as human beings, we shouldn't list any at all...

Also see

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment09/#f5

To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever...

[VTMechEngr]

8. Privacy is misunderstood. It is a basic right in our Constitution.

In our founding father's days, they did not use the word privacy. That was a phrase reserved for being alone at a privy(outhouse). The word for being left alone in those times: Liberty!

If the radical rightwing wants to argue we don't have a right to liberty, just repeat their arguments (washed to erase privacy and substitute liberty) to everyone. Lets "invented" them back on the issue.

[madrchsod]

13. i see you remember that privacy meant something different...

it is really scary that intelligent people use the argument that privacy is never mentioned as a tool to take away our basic rights.

[tocqueville]

14. interesting but wrong

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to stop information about themselves from becoming known to people other than those they choose to give the information to.

It's not a synonym of liberty. It's only an aspect of security.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in article 12, states:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Most countries have laws protecting privacy. In some countries this is part of their constitution, such as France's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. If the privacy of an individual is breached, the individual may bring a lawsuit asking for monetary damages. However, in the United Kingdom, recent cases involving celebrities such as David Beckham, however, have resulted in defeat as the information has been determined in the courts to be in the public interest<2>.

In various civil cases, the Supreme Court of the United States has found that the Constitution contains "penumbras" that implicitly grant a right to privacy against government intrusion; such cases include Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) (which allowed parents/guardians to educate their children), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) (which explicitly recognised the right to privacy), Roe v. Wade (1973) (which prevented states from legislating against abortion), and Lawrence v. Texas (2003) (which prevented states from legislating against sodomy). On the other hand, the Supreme Court, in California v. Greenwood (1988), decided that trash does not carry a privacy expectation. The penumbral privacy right has also not been found to apply to government intrusion into individuals' financial data as it applies to the income tax, their residency data as it applies to the Census, or age data as once applied to conscription and now applies to registration for the non-existent draft.

As the U.S. constitution does not explicitly grant a right to privacy, its application by the Court to privacy cases seems quite arbitrary and the right to privacy is a hotly debated issue — strict constructionists argue that there is no such right and civil libertarians argue that the right invalidates many types of surveillance, such as CCTV cameras and wiretaps.

Most states in the U.S. grant a right to privacy and recognise four torts:

Intrusion upon seclusion or solitude, or into private affairs;
Public disclosure of embarrassing private facts;
Publicity which places a person in a false light in the public eye; and
Appropriation of name or likeness.

it has very little to do with liberty, it has to do with cultural aspects of human life which can vary depending on culture and historic period. For example being naked is considered a private matter today and it wasn't in ancient cultures.

In Sweden your tax declarations, school grades and bank accounts (only for authorities) are not private.

As they say, if you have nothing to hide....

[VTMechEngr]

17. It is also the ability to have people not in your "business"

And that was very much on the mind of our founding fathers. It is part of your liberty to be able to keep the government from knowing everything about you. When you make decisions, you do not have a Minder watching your deliberations. We currently have this right, have had it all along, and only now is the right ready to begin an effort to infringe it.

[Mairead]

18. "Most states in the U.S. grant a right to privacy and recognise four torts

Most regrettably, that's not so. See Alderman & Kennedy The Right to Privacy, 1995, NY, Knopf.

The book is a caselaw survey that shows just how fragile our 'right to be let alone' is. Court after court has found, often on the flimsiest and most counter-intuitive grounds, that this or that invasion of privacy is 'in the public interest'.

For example, a tabloid photographer sneaked onto the grounds of a private psychiatric hospital and photographed two of the patients, the photo being published on the front page the next day.

One of the photographees (Hedda Nussbaum) was notorious at the time for having killed her abusive lover, but the other woman was just an ordinary person whose family, friends, and business associates had had no idea that she had committed herself to resolve some problems.

The second woman sued for invasion and lost. NY's highest court held that the story was in the public interest and the photo showing Nussbaum with a 'smiling companion' was an essential part of the story.


For another example, a newspaper in Iowa published the identity of one of the women who had been involuntarily sterilised while living in a county home. The woman had long since left the home and made a new life for herself; she sued for invasion. And she lost. The Iowa court held that 'the identity of victims of involuntary sterilisation is a matter of legitimate public concern'. The newspaper had had a right to 'name names' because it made the story more real to readers, 'fostering perception and understanding'.


As another example, a kidnapped woman was taken to an apartment, stripped, and terrorised. The apartment was surrounded by the police and the media. Eventually the police rescued the woman, but they hustled her to safety still naked. A photograph of that appeared the next day in the newspaper. She sued for invasion and lost on appeal. The Florida court held that the event was newsworthy, 'a typical exciting emotion-packed drama to which newspeople, and others, are attracted'.

[NVMojo]

9. on the money ....true story

[PDittie]

16. Kicked

and recommended, especially for the postings on liberty and privacy.

[sweetheart]

19. privacy is an unenumerated right (9th)

At the time of the constitution, given the population of the US, and
the road and communications networks, a person had easy access to
privacy. But this has blurred with electronic communications that can
now take a disclosure that would be whispered about around the villiage
such as someone seeing a lover outside marriage... and such a thing
suddenly is global news via electronic media. The right to be protected
from electronic media existed but remained unnecessary to draft at the
time of the bill of rights.

In that sense, perhaps there is a grey area around privacy, where the
medium of disclosure is the problem, as in olden times, reading through
the archives of a town hall involved actually *visiting* the town. And
research was something not on google searches, something involving
much more serious endeavour, and by the very friction of the discovery
process, even public information was sorta kept private.

The constitution has failed miserably at protecting itself from artificial technologies and their corruptions of its ideals.
1. Corporations
2. money and the federal reserve
3. electronic mass media
4. oil-based transportation

Each of these technologies has totally corrupted the constitution
by their misappropriation.

[Mairead]

24. "The constitution has failed miserably at protecting itself"

Ah, but you're presuming that the hardcore Federalists among the 55 ultra-wealthy Framers cared. I don't think it's at all clear that they did--the Constitution as written was nothing more than a business agreement, really, designed (as Madison and others saw no reason not to admit in their record of the proceedings) to protect the wealthy from democracy and one another.

[sweetheart]

25. The presumption of any frame at all

Yes chained in original sin to 55 neocons, what is one to do.

I'm for a new constitution. I don't accept that we know less now
than they did 200 years ago, nor do i accept the low standards of
governance that were acceptable in a feudal time, paltry rights and
eroded liberty. Are these not echos of plato's paranoia of mob
rule as the erosion of trust in real democratic choice.

Yet were there no scrap of paper, ahh, what great potential and
possibilities lay before us. And it is become an irony, that the paper
that represented at one time, a positive agreement, has beocme a
million tonne burden... and gosh, would somebody torch the bloody
thing already.

[Nikki Stone 1]

20. recommended

:kick:

[bluedawg12]

21. The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy

ROE V WADE:

http://members.aol.com/abtrbng/roefl-o2.htm

JUSTICE HARRY BLACKMUN:

"The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U. S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment[]; in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments[]; in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights[]; in the Ninth Amendment, id., at 486 (Goldberg, J., concurring); or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment[]. These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed "fundamental" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," [] are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage[]; procreation[]; contraception[]; family relationships[]; and child rearing and education[].

"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

[Festivito]

22. If there is no right to INFORMATION then freedom does not exist.

Can be said just as easily. Privacy as a battlecry can, and is being used to UN-democratize our nation.

As insulated individuals, we, the people, lose power.

Our rights to privacy are our rights NOT to be UNDULY searched, seized, denied, et. al.

The right to NOT be a part of the system, is NOT there -- and should not be there, ever.

[Gregorian]

23. And by that standard,

some of us have been living in Bush's America since the late 1970's.