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The founders could envision quite a lot, but the sorts of privacy violations we're concerned about today (video and audio surveillance, license plate scanning,

The founders could envision quite a lot, but the sorts of privacy violations we're concerned about today (video and audio surveillance, license plate scanning, drones, archives of search histories and personal correspondence and knowledge of personal interests) are beyond what they could have anticipated, because technology. The kind of privacy they were concerned with was government agents personally and physically intruding on private citizens' personal lives. The federal government at that time was not in a position to intrude very much on individuals' privacy, but even so we got the 3rd and 4th amendments. The feds had minimal domestic scope, and there was relatively little federal law enforcement. The founders anticipated some federal government scope creep, but not this.

themartorana 13y ago
They were so short-sighted! How could you not foresee robot drones video recording or remotely raining down death from the sky?! I've know about it since Terminator II for crying out loud.
alexqgb 13y ago
Most people think of "reasonable expectation of privacy" as meaning "what can I reasonably expect the police to respect given all they're technically capable of?" Obviously, the boundaries of this interpretation are tightening like a noose. But the standard can also be interpreted to mean "what is a reasonable level of privacy to expect in order for government of, by, and for the people to operate?" Or as Abraham Lincoln would put it, to "not perish from this Earth." By this standard, an awful lot of what's done by the police and military is wildly unreasonable. Indeed, the extraordinary threat to democracy posed by their near-total lack of restraint is why their orgy of abuse has attracted such shock and dismay. No reasonable person can expect this hyper-secretive, massively financed, and totally contemptuous set of organizations to happily coexist with legitimate democratic rule and the security of individual liberty. By that standard, the Founders clearly anticipated and specifically disallowed what's now unfolding.
pessimizer 13y ago
An electronic intrusion is also a physical intrusion. Electricity is physical; and at some point there is a person carrying a physical machine and physically moving cables around, attempting to overhear two people talking. Someone somewhere is switching on their laptop, plugging a wire into it (or searching for a wireless signal from a physical antenna nearby) and touching a keyboard to send impulses down that wire to interface with the first machine, etc. We act like we think it's magic, so we can rationalize having to come up with a new set of laws that are more permissive to abuses of power. It starts when a court says that a searching a pen register is so small an intrusion as to be insignificant, and that no one could possibly have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy when interacting with someone who has to record their usage in order to bill them. After that, it was an explicitly slippery slope.
Zigurd 13y ago
The Framers were actually very concerned about militarized police and illegal searches. "Redcoats" were a militarized national police. That's how we got radically liberal gun rights, in order to be armed-up like regulars. The US Constitution is, in general, addressed to the government, giving the government a limited set of powers, and not to the people, and, therefore it explicitly says it does not enumerate rights. It assumes your rights are everything outside the scope of government. That was the approach to future-proofing it. So there really is no problem with the Constitution. The problem is the people allow these things to happen.

themartorana 13y ago

They were so short-sighted! How could you not foresee robot drones video recording or remotely raining down death from the sky?! I've know about it since Terminator II for crying out loud.

alexqgb 13y ago

Most people think of "reasonable expectation of privacy" as meaning "what can I reasonably expect the police to respect given all they're technically capable of?" Obviously, the boundaries of this interpretation are tightening like a noose. But the standard can also be interpreted to mean "what is a reasonable level of privacy to expect in order for government of, by, and for the people to operate?" Or as Abraham Lincoln would put it, to "not perish from this Earth." By this standard, an awful lot of what's done by the police and military is wildly unreasonable. Indeed, the extraordinary threat to democracy posed by their near-total lack of restraint is why their orgy of abuse has attracted such shock and dismay. No reasonable person can expect this hyper-secretive, massively financed, and totally contemptuous set of organizations to happily coexist with legitimate democratic rule and the security of individual liberty. By that standard, the Founders clearly anticipated and specifically disallowed what's now unfolding.

pessimizer 13y ago

An electronic intrusion is also a physical intrusion. Electricity is physical; and at some point there is a person carrying a physical machine and physically moving cables around, attempting to overhear two people talking. Someone somewhere is switching on their laptop, plugging a wire into it (or searching for a wireless signal from a physical antenna nearby) and touching a keyboard to send impulses down that wire to interface with the first machine, etc. We act like we think it's magic, so we can rationalize having to come up with a new set of laws that are more permissive to abuses of power. It starts when a court says that a searching a pen register is so small an intrusion as to be insignificant, and that no one could possibly have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy when interacting with someone who has to record their usage in order to bill them. After that, it was an explicitly slippery slope.

Zigurd 13y ago

The Framers were actually very concerned about militarized police and illegal searches. "Redcoats" were a militarized national police. That's how we got radically liberal gun rights, in order to be armed-up like regulars. The US Constitution is, in general, addressed to the government, giving the government a limited set of powers, and not to the people, and, therefore it explicitly says it does not enumerate rights. It assumes your rights are everything outside the scope of government. That was the approach to future-proofing it. So there really is no problem with the Constitution. The problem is the people allow these things to happen.